AI is not Making Engineers 10x as Productive

Re:AI is not Making Engineers 10x as Productive by Waterluvian on Tuesday August 05, 2025 @07:32PM (#44805817)

> I've estimated that LLMs make me 2-5x more productive on the parts of my job which involve typing code into a computer, which is itself a small portion of that I do as a software engineer.

This feels exactly right and is what I’ve thought since this all began.

But it also makes me think maybe there are those that A.I. helps 10x, but more because that code input is actually a very large part of their job. Some coders aren’t doing much design or engineering, just assembly.

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Re:AI is not Making Engineers 10x as Productive by simonw on Tuesday August 05, 2025 @08:00PM (#44806035)

Yeah, I hadn't thought about that. If you really are a programmer who gets all of their work assigned to them as detailed specifications maybe you are seeing a 10x boost.

I don't think I've encountered programmer like that in my own career, but I guess they might exist somewhere!

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Re:AI is not Making Engineers 10x as Productive by astrange on Wednesday August 06, 2025 @03:41AM (#44808910)

Personally I've found it's very good at writing support tools / shell scripts. I mostly use it to parse the output of other tools that don't have machine-readable output yet.

Claude Code (which is apparently the best in general) isn't very good at reviewing existing large projects IME, because it doesn't want to load a lot of text into its context. If you ask it to review an existing project it'll search for keywords instead of just loading an entire file.

That and it really wants to please you, so if you imply you own a project it'll be a lot more positive than it may deserve.

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