Re:Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence
by mattmanser on Friday March 06, 2026 @02:05AM
(#47271901)
The real question is, is it increasing their velocity?
They've already admitted they just 'throw the code away and start again'.
I think we've got another victim of perceived productivity gains vs actual productivity drop.
People sitting around watching Claude churn out poor code at a slower rate than if they just wrote it themselves.
Don't get me wrong, great for getting you started or writing a little prototype.
But the code is bad, riddled with subtle bugs and if you're not rewriting it and shoving large amounts of AI code into your codebase, good luck in 6-12 months time.
The question is really, velocity _of what_?
I got this from a HN comment. It really hit for me because the default mentality for engineers is to build. The more you build the better. That's not "wrong" but in a business setting it is very much necessary but not sufficient. And so whenever we think about productivity, impact, velocity, whatever measure of output, the real question is _of what_? More code? More product surface area? That was never really the problem. In fact it makes life worse majority of the time.