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A comment on Ask HN: Why there are no actual studies that show AI is more productive?.

Re:Ask HN: Why there are no actual studies that show AI is m... by IshKebab on Sunday March 08, 2026 @05:58AM (#47295984)
These sort of things are really hard to study. Combine that with the fact that the AI landscape is so varied and fast moving... It's easy to see why there aren't many studies on it.

There are a mountain of things that we reasonably know to be true but haven't done studies on. Is it beneficial for programming languages to support comments? Are regexes error-prone? Does static typing improve productivity on large projects? Is distributed version control better than centralised (lock based)? Etc.

Also you can't just say "AI improves productivity". What kind of AI? What are you using it for? If you're making static landing pages... yeah obviously it's going to help. Writing device drivers in Ada? Not so much.

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Re:Ask HN: Why there are no actual studies that show AI is m... by teew on Sunday March 08, 2026 @06:22AM (#47296114)
I think these comparisons are unfairly picked. A good chunk of the world's economy is not currently jacked up on the promise that comments in code will lead to unimaginably high value (in pretty much every field from medicine to the media industry) in the span of a couple of years. Given the claims and market valuations around AI, wouldn't you agree a bit more hard evidence would be reassuring?
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