The AI industry's claims about AI coding assistants boosting productivity significantly appear to be massively overblown, per a new report.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/49954591

“No Duh,” say senior developers everywhere.

The article explains that vibe code often is close, but not quite, functional, requiring developers to go in and find where the problems are - resulting in a net slowdown of development rather than productivity gains.

Then there’s the issue of finding an agreed-upon way of tracking productivity gains, a glaring omission given the billions of dollars being invested in AI.

To Bain & Company, companies will need to fully commit themselves to realize the gains they’ve been promised.

“Fully commit” to see the light? That… sounds more like a kind of religion, not like critical or even rational thinking.

  • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
    10·
    21 days ago

    I actually think a new field of “real” programmers will emerge, in which they are specialized at looking for Ai problems. So companies using Ai and get rid of programmers, will start hiring programmers to get rid of Ai problems.

    • blarghly@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      21 days ago

      I mean, more realistically… ai can’t really write code reliably, but if utilized appropriately it can write code faster than a developer on their own. And in this way, it is similar to every other kind of tooling we’ve created. And what we’ve seen in the past is that when developers get better tooling, the amount of available software work increases rather than decreases. Why? Because when it takes fewer developer hours to bring a product to market, it lowers the barrier to entry for trying to create a new product. It used to be that custom software was only written for large, rich institutions who would benefit from economies of scale. Now every beat up taco truck has its own website.

      And then, once all these products are brought to market, that code needs maintenance. Upgrades. New features. Bug fixes. Etc.