Before performing the study, the developers in question expected the AI tools would lead to a 24 percent reduction in the time needed for their assigned tasks. Even after completing those tasks, the developers believed that the AI tools had made them 20 percent faster, on average. In reality, though, the AI-aided tasks ended up being completed 19 percent slower than those completed without AI tools.
This assumes that lower estimated time = lower stress levels, when other factors could easily be throwing off time estimation. Think the trope of someone very busy at work who realizes they’ve worked through lunch or dinner. I would have expected people who spend 20% less mental effort on something to be less engaged and more bored by the passage of time, not less.
Also, importantly, improving worker conditions is something that can reduce burnout without the burden of massive data centers. We don’t have to make a machine that produces the illusion of speech to pay people better.
Also: you can multitask with these things! Prompt it and let it cook for several minutes while you do something else. I feel like the people in this study must have been blankly staring at the code generating to get an overall slowdown…
Or spent more time debugging what it produced than it would have taken to write it themselves.
Nah, not if you’re using it in a reasonable way.