Between the fraction of my time I spend actually writing code, and how much of the typing time I’m using to think anyway, I dunno how much of an increase in my overall productivity could realistically be achieved by something that just helped me type the code in faster. Probably not 25% no matter how fast it made that part. 5% is maybe possible, for something that made that part like 2-3x faster, but much more than that and it’d run up against a wall and stop speeding things up.

I imagine that those who cherished the written word thought similar thoughts when the printing press was invented, when the typewriter was invented, and before excel took over bookkeeping.

My productivity isn't so much enhanced. It's only 1%... 2%... 5%... globally, for each employee.

Have you ever dabbled with, mucked around in, a command line? Autocomplete functions there save millions of man-hour-typing-units per year. Something to think about.

A single employee, in a single task, for a single location may not equal much gained productivity, but companies now think on much larger scales than a single office location.

This is a fallacy because there is no way to add up 1% savings across 100 employees into an extra full time employee.

Work gets scheduled on short time frames. 5% savings isn't enough to change the schedule for any one person. At most, it gives me time to grab an extra coffee. I can't string together "foregone extra coffees" into "more tasks/days in the schedule".

This. I had the same conversation years ago with someone who said "imagine if Windows booted 30s faster, all the productivity gains across the world!" And I said the same thing you did: people turn their computer on and then make a cup of tea.

Now making a kettle faster? That might actually be something.

If 25% of code was AI-written, wouldn't it be a 33[.333...]% increase in productivity?

Not if there was also an 8.333̅% increase in slacking off.

Wait, no. That should be based on how much slacking off Google employees do ordinarily, an unknown quantity.

You can just check Memegen traffic to figure that one out.

It is not a direct correlation. I might write 80% of the lines of code in a week, then spend the next 6 months on the remaining 20%. If the AI was mostly helpfull in that first week, overall productivity gain would be very low.

Who spends 100% of their time actually typing code?

It’s probably closer to 10% than 100%, especially at big companies.

One thing I would love to see is reports of benefits from various tools coming with one’s typing ability in WPM. I’d also like to see that on posts where people express a preference for “a quick call” or stopping by your desk rather than posting what they want in chat. I have some hypotheses I’d like to test out.