It's only been at most the past year where AI has been unambiguously helpful and not a hindrance. 3 years ago it gave the appearance of being helpful but it tended to be more of a hindrance.
replyperhaps being 30-50% ‘busier’ is something quite different from being 30-50% more ‘productive’ and ppl are just bad at detecting the difference
replyMaybe so, but least for me in my personal coding projects, I'm going through my own task list noticeably faster. I had created this list before getting a ChatGPT Pro subscription and the number of bugs found in AI reviews and rate of closing tasks has certainly increased. I'm not saying my anecdote scales to teams or even other people, but I have no doubt about my personal productivity change. I wouldn't be paying for it otherwise.
replyIMO the constraint is that AI is still rather anaemic at sustainable green-field projects: It's good at one-off oneshots, and also at refactoring or fixing bugs or adding features to existing projects, where test suites and significant architectural scaffolding already exists, but the more you move away from that, the more wobbly the results get, and the more the human once again becomes the bottleneck, for all the hard work of coming up with all the conceptual scaffolding in the first place. Typing speed rarely was the bottleneck there anyway.
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