I brought data to this discussion. What did you bring?

I don’t believe your data. Velocity on my team has gone up 7x on my team over the last two months. I’m having a hard time riding product and my business analysts because they’re not coming up with stories fast enough. We’re actually thinking of having an intervention for them because they’re not using LLMs nearly as much as they should be. Designers are still hand placing components in figmas.

100%. My engineering teams velocity (and I mean this in terms of bug free, valuable needle moving features shipped) has gone up immensely. TBF it was already a very talented senior group of people, but having that kind of group embrace the tooling for what it is has made a massive difference.

Is this satire?

Sorry, I can’t tell if you’re replying to me or to the parent - HN interface is hard to figure out…maybe the parent since it was flagged? - but I assure you that my comment wasn’t satirical in the slightest.

Your data shows a 20% improvement. That's $20-100k a year depending on how much devs are paid.

You just compared this AI shift to "tractors on farms". Did tractors increase farming output by 20%?

The first tractors in 1911 or whatever probably did. 50 years on and it was many times that.

No, at least not if you're talking about tractors broadly. The first practical traction engines (~1860) were pretty much instantly revolutionary.

I suppose you could make the claim that the first things commonly called tractors (which were petrol-powered) might not have increased productivity very much, but "tractors on farms" should surely be read as the revolutionary moment, not the change in dominant fuel type 50 years later.

Also, it's likely not safe to read "20% increase in PRs" as "20% productivity improvement".

They dont show that. They show 20% more PR. That is not the same as 20% more productivity.

You don't get paid 20% more for achieving 20% more achievement, that's for sure.

Agreed, people confuse the (totally expected) bumps and bruises of early adoption with somehow equating to "this technology is useless."

The Wright Brothers couldn't cross the Atlantic in their first flier and plenty of subsequent designs crashed and burned (literally). But now air travel is commonplace. Same will happen with AI, we just have to get past these early pains.

Bad analogy. Horses were the automagic being replaced.

It's not remotely comparable to tractors. Tractors actually do their job correctly and consistently.