> Arguing in good faith
will be futile, unfortunately.
And on the ROI side, trying things out regularly, I haven’t seen the positive ROI in the limited time I’ve dedicated to exploring the tools. I’ve restricted experimenting to 4 hours per month, because spending more than 2.5% of the month chasing productivity improvements that realistically seem to be 10-20%, will quickly eat into those gains. After accounting for token costs, it ends up being a wash.
You can't learn how to use _anything_ by experimenting 4 hours a month.
With infinite time anything is possible, but since we live within constraints, discussing practical, real world thresholds or evaluation methods is a worthwhile use of our time.
AI is a powerful tool. Depending on what I need I use chatgpt, in-ide agents, or a platform like Devin.ai.
I use it when it helps me advance my goals. I don't when it doesn't. Sometimes it misses the mark and I scale back and have it do a specific piece and I'll do the rest.
Sometimes I use it to analyze the code base in seconds vs minutes. Sometimes I use it to pinpoint a bug fast.
Ive solved customer issues in seconds and minutes with it vs hours.
I worked on a banking app with deeply domain specific data issues. AI was not very helpful on that team. My current work on consumer web apps mean my problems are more mundane and AI is a big accelerant.
Being and engineer means solving the problems with the right tools with the right tradeoffs as well. It's why I use an idea vs notepad, I use chatgpt for one-off scripts and "chat", and i use agentic workflows for big, repetitive, or "boring" low-stakes tasks.
lets get nitty gritty on this - can you say how you did this? because a lot of people think this is an unsolved problem
There are a lot of little things we’ve tracked, and it’s just faster to implement things now. To be fair, everyone on my team has decade+ professional experience (many more non-prodessional), and we understand limitations of AI fairly well.
> to be fair, everyone on my team has decade+ professional experience (many more non-prodessional), and we understand limitations of AI fairly well.
I see this appear quite often in discussions on productivity, to the point that a conclusion may be made regarding its centrality for productivity gains.