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.

  • majster@lemmy.zipEnglish
    93·
    9 hours ago

    I’m a dev at a tech startup. Most devs at the company are pretty impressed by claude code and find it very useful. Hence the company has a pretty hefty budget allocated for it.

    What I need to do is think trough the problem at hand and claude will do the code->build->unit test cycles until it satisfies the objective. In the meantime I can drink cofee in peace and go to bathroom.

    To me and to many of my coworkers its a completley new work paradigm.

    • nic2555@lemmy.world
      8·
      6 hours ago

      Maybe I should try it to understand, but to me, this kind of feel like it would produce code that would not follow the company standards, code that will be harder to debug since the dev have little to no idea on how it work and code that is overall of less quality than the code produce by a dev that doesn’t use AI.

      And I would not trust those unit tests, since how can you be sure if they test the correct thing, if you never made them fail in the first place. A unit test that passes right away is not a test you should rely on.

      Don’t take it the wrong way, but if Claude write all of your code, doesn’t that make you more of a product owner than a dev ?

      • majster@lemmy.zipEnglish
        21·
        3 hours ago

        sorry my comment mislead you, it’s not that hands off experience that you transform from dev to pm. Its more like a smart code monkey that helps you. I absolutely have to review almost all of the code but I’m sparred typing

        • nic2555@lemmy.world
          2·
          3 hours ago

          Thank you for clarifying. It does align more with the way I would use LLM in my day to day work then, which is quite reassuring.

          Even if it doesn’t work for me, I can still see the advantage of using AI assistant in those context. In the end, as long as you are doing the work required, the tools you use don’t really matters!