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> Seems hard to believe […]

This goes back before AI, with computers not being found to be improving productivity numbers: Solow's paradox.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

* https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-solow-productivity-pa...

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> it allows me to automate simple things like writing small patches or config changes in a matter of minutes where before I would have invested hours

One of the problems here is that things like this only count as "increased productivity" in the economic sense if it results in more income at the end of the funnel. Are you actually making more product faster in all your new-found free time?

Very few orgs I've worked in have actually been limited by the speed of programmers writing code. Usually it's communication overhead and management processes eating up most of the bandwidth - and those tend to expand to absorb any additional bandwidth.

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Yup. And in my experience, AI has made the communication and decision making overhead significantly worse thanks to 100x longer docs, code that noone understands and enormous pressure by executives to magically produce software that just works.
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That's just because most people are bad at communication to start with.

Look at all the shit github README before llm. Most repos didn't bother because it was effort. those few that did, were because of autistic focus. Of those, very few were "great" user documentation.

now llms are here, the effort barrier is gone, and now we're inundated with shit README that provide no value to users nor respect their time.

Once you start applying SKILL.md that revolve around fixing HOW to communicate value to users in a way that respects their time, you'll see this story change in noticeable places.

I doubt it will change everywhere because it also requires that you give a shit about doing this in the first place, so those people Ed Zitron talks about... business idiots won't care, because they're ultimately nihlist.

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> One of the problems here is that things like this only count as "increased productivity" in the economic sense if it results in more income at the end of the funnel. Are you actually making more product faster in all your new-found free time?

This strikes me as a problem with how we define productivity in this context. If I can do my job in 1 hour, when it took me 8 before, am I not more productive in a rate-based sense? Sure, I might only work 5 hours in a week instead of 40, so my net production is the same, but my rate of productivity was certainly much higher.

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Wealth created is still the same, and that's what an economist means by "productive" - you produced X amount of wealth (usually measured in dollar amounts).

It's like "work" meaning one thing to a normal person, but something very specific and counterintuitive in Newtonian physics (if you carry a fifty-pound weight in a circle and stop at your starting point, you've done no work).

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I mean I can deliver the same software in one month that I delivered in maybe 3 months before and for many things I don't need a dedicated frontend developer, designer or writer anymore. So for me it's the case!
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Even if it was true… does anyone really believe that companies will stop using AI?
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