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Before starting tasks, developers forecast that allowing AI will reduce completion time by 24%. After completing the study, developers estimate that allowing AI reduced completion time by 20%. Surprisingly, we find that allowing AI actually increases completion time by 19%
N = 16
The more important detail is that it's 16 experienced developers. If there's going to be an advantage with AI development tools, it's going to most likely be seen with junior devs with a much wider gap between current and peak performance. This was my first thought reading the article, and it's called out in the study.
I don't think that's true. In fact most people say the opposite - AI doesn't help junior devs because they can't recognise when it's bullshitting. I don't really believe that either - that's just ego talking. I expect it helps people of all experience levels fairly equally, but only with tasks that are relatively simple. It's not like senior engineers never do those though.
Have anything behind that? The paper we're discussing has 4 citations in agreement, so I'm not so sure that most people say the opposite.
What do you mean? I've seen people say that all the time on HN. No I'm not going to go and search for comments.
I meant actual data. You're refuting a claim backed by several cited studies in the OP.
Oh you mean when I said this?
No I don't have actual data, just direct personal experience of asking AI to do simple and complex tasks - it does much better on simple tasks, especially in very widely discussed domains (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python etc.) Ask it any SystemVerilog stuff and it gets it wrong almost every time annoyingly!
That's my issue with AI. I go to AI after my skills, the documentation and google failed me. Then I go to ChatGPT to get lied to, because ChatGPT doesn't know either.
And almost without fail, AI doesn't help me there.
The only thing where AI helps is AI autocomplete in die IDE, if I am doing something very simple and monotonous, then it helps me to sometimes reduce my typing speed a little bit compared to regular autocomplete.
But typing time is like 0.5% of the time I spend developing stuff.