> Meanwhile, a study (late 2025) seems to report that although participating developers felt they completed tasks faster using AI, they where around 19% slower.

METR reran the study early this year and, while they caveat it, this time they found a speedup, which is consistent with subjective estimates of productivity also having increased -- the simplest explanation is that subjective estimates exaggerate, but there's still a speedup with current models: https://metr.org/blog/2026-02-24-uplift-update/#wider-adopti...

(Nobody seems to cite the followup since it's not such a fun counterintuitive finding.)

These articles are so off from reality to the point that it can't be taken seriously at all. I keep wondering how they keep popping at HN.

At least the author admit he is biased..

Zitron might be right about the economics of it, maybe it really does come crashing down. But we won't be forgetting about it. Even if AI stopped progressing today, it will still be massively, undeniably, insanely useful.

I could use current models forever. LLM does things for me that couldn't be done in 2023. I don't want to go back to a world without it, but I'm also ok with progress stalling right here.

As for the productivity benefits, I find there is a kind of skeptic that just has his eyes closed. Open an AI page, ask it to write you an app that renames all your scientific papers so they have their title as the filename instead of the weird long number.

Without AI you could easily waste an hour looking for the right PDF library and working out how to use it. Or fiddling with the file search mechanism so that you only get the articles and not every file in your downloads. Now you will have the files renamed in a few minutes, and a tool that keeps them correct every time you have download some more.

How is this not a productivity win? It clearly is. Do we really need a double blind test to check this kind of thing?

Whether it gets squandered in modern orgs is another matter, but the core win is clear for everyone to see.

I think it really depends on your knowledge and skill, and the kind of work you are using it for. It's hard to measure because the more you use it the more you lose some skills. But I have to admit that I can do much more parallel work when using the best models. It's messy, because sometimes I feel that I get lazier and just prompt them and go do some random stuff and sometimes even skip the part of verifying what they actually did meanwhile. But you can command AI to do massive stuff, you can get smart non developers to do useful work with them, it's really a new paradigm. One funny thing that I think people should consider more is pride in the code. If I code something by hand, like fully developing a service, I will get proud of seeing it work, I will attach to it like if it's my creation. That hardly happens if I use AI a lot.

I think it's very productive in areas that aren't economically impactful. Reverse engineering old windows games for example. Doing absurd ports between languages.

Now imagine if this was written about the first steam engines being used inefficiently to pull coal up out the ground and pump out the water. It's so expensive -- is this really more effective than just hiring 50 men? We all know how that ended up...

I think you might be fooling yourself. Personal-plan subscription subsidies do not equate to "it's not viable, and all of it is about to be shut off." If that were true, then Kilo Code, Claude Code, Cline, Pi, and Command Code would not be occupying 5 of the top 10 apps using OpenRouter. People have purchased 20 trillion tokens this month already for coding on OpenRouter alone at full-price market rates.

Would you commission a study about whether cars are really a faster form of locomotion before deciding to purchase one?

There is empirical data right in front of your face. You're just choosing to exclude it because of where you already stand.

That's exactly what Feynman was warning about.

These people keep citing that survey from 2025.

That kills all arguments from the article instantly.

December 2025 through today GenAI has become massively better. I’ve built things with Claude in contracted spans of time that would have been man-years in the before times.

We've been debating how to measure software engineering productivity since long before LLMs. It depends on so many different factors. Scrum is sort of the only tool we have that comes close, but we all hate it. Aside from that, all we really have are personal anecdotes.

Here are my personal anecdotes for the week. I occasionally ask AI to write some SystemVerilog test bench code. This is an area where I have deep and long experience. AI has never once saved me time with that. Just yesterday, however, I was writing a tricky Makefile, something I rarely do, and AI helped a lot.

Aside from productivity, this article mentions ethical and financial issues with AI. That doesn't stick with the subject that the title of the essay implies, but it's a more concrete thing to discuss and I wish we'd spend more time on that. I think that's where people really are fooling themselves.

I read this headline and thought "METR study"... and sure enough, a few paragraphs in:

> Meanwhile, a study (late 2025) seems to report that although participating developers felt they completed tasks faster using AI, they where around 19% slower.

I think you might be fooling yourself if you build your entire worldview concerning the productivity benefits of AI-assisted programming around that one study from one organization that confirms your priors.

This is where I find it lacking:

1. I am not yet convinced that I am more productive with AI for complex tasks. But, I am fairly certain for trivial tasks, or bureaucratic tasks AI has lessened my cognitive load (data point of one).

2. Does AI run on money, or does it run on energy? Money is the means by which we facilitate exchange. But in reality, the energy in the universe is ginormous. The fundamental thing to keep AI going is available in excess, all other things are negotiation.

3. Is AI bad for the environment or is it the way we obtain energy bad for the environment? The trend seems to be that energy is getting cheaper and cleaner. The world is not static, but will move to accommodate a world with AI.

I agree with the point about we don't have clear/perceivable increase in value I.e. companies are not 10x profitable due AI.

But, I don't understand the position of that has no value or that is going to be "turned off", that is just doomsday prophecy at this point.

We focus so much in code, but AI have changed many if not most of the work. It made possible to take a chance in challenges that would once be dismissed of the bat.

I do think we are still get used to the new ways of work, which IMO is a moving target. Once that we overcome that, results may come clear, but that may not be in companies making 10x more revenue.

>I'm quite influenced by Ed Zitron's reporting. And I'm also standing by my own idea that AI will run out of money and just be turned off due to the huge operational cost.

I wish this were how things are going but Uber is still surviving. I figure at least one AI company is going to come out of this alive and kicking.

From TFA>>I'm open to suggestions how this is going to play out. Close to a trillion dollars invested in AI. Where will the money come from to recuperate all these investments?

If investors are looking for a 50% return, they need the investment to be worth about $1.5 trillion. If they're looking for a 100% return, it needs to be worth about $2 trillion. That's still an enormous hurdle, but it's much smaller than suggesting AI needs to somehow generate trillions of dollars in cash simply to recoup the original investment.

AI costs aren’t going to stay this high. They will go down. Nobody is going to turn off AI, but they will care about making sure that we are reasonably efficient when using it. Compute that can happen locally will. Communities that responsibly want to build data centers are. Climate implications will be addressed by policy. People said the same about the internet 30 years ago… It’s not about raw productivity. It’s about perceived effort. If a job feels easier with AI assistance we’ll demand it. If AI checking a human’s work is more reliable than a human checking AI’s work (it is) that’s what we’ll deploy.

> And I'm also standing by my own idea that AI will run out of money and just be turned off due to the huge operational cost.

Thats a pretty strong outcome. It implies that not only are GPUs that power AI too expensive long term, but they cost too much to operate even if they were free.

Seems to me the more likely outcome is a wave of dotCom style bankruptcies wiping out equity holders for companies who contracted to buy chips and datacenters at MSRP, and a second wave for the groups that step in after to operate whats left without the absurd financing charges and lower capex.

This is the perfect archetype of an intellectually lazy anti-AI post. The author ends with his admission of bias, but he'd be better off starting with it, as it's clear that his reasoning flows entirely from it. AI is bad for productivity, says this single study from 2025. AI is unsustainable, says this article I found. AI will all just disappear one day... because I hope so?

Ironically, the author would have been better asking an LLM to write the article. At least it would have found better sources and developed more convincing arguments.

Many improvements have come to AI that have reduced costs of inference and training, like sparse attention, and many more will arise in the future. To talk about the cost of AI right now versus the future is to talk about the first IBM computers versus the personal computing that appeared years later. The cost will go down. In fact that is what the major labs are definitely banking on.

Author does not draw full enough picture (by linearly projecting current trends). But still has good points. I liked the one where perceived "productivity" is compared against unsubsisdized token prices.

Eh, I feel the productivity argument kinda depends what sort of project you're using it for. If it's a local tool that only needs to solve a very specific problem you personally have, or you're treading well trodden ground represented in the data set (like WordPress plugin or React component development), you could probably just let an LLM handle almost everything and get a perfectly adequate solution in minutes.

And if you don't know anything about programming, or don't care that the solution it'll come up with is potentially flawed, then it's a lot quicker to vibe code up some sort of hack job answer than learn how to do everything manually. I'm pretty sure that my non-technical parents or grandparents could ask Claude or ChatGPT to build a simple website for their small business or charity, and have something workable within an hour or two.

For a software engineer, AI might not make them any more productive. For a non-engineer, it's basically magic.

The unsustainability thing is more of a concern though, and the external effects of AI are a huge problem. It's just that pure productivity wise, a lot of people will be significantly more productive with these systems than without them.

I think you might be fooling yourself with stale data.

There are definitely many open questions around things like what tasks is AI appropriate for, how involved should you be in the process (fully automated agent swarms, or planning steps back and forth with human input on every decision), at what level of usage might you hit diminishing or negative returns, will we be able to continue to use it at this rate / price, will it get cheaper or will energy use continue to rise, how much will AI improve in the future, how will AI use affect people's development or temperament, will skills atrophy, will people no longer learn critical skills, how will we deal with AI spam or a loss of "proof of work" in producing a lengthy written artifact.... in sum there is no shortage of AI related topics worth exploring and thinking deeply about.

Some people still suggest that AI flat out isn't useful though, and that angle to me doesn't hold much water. I was a slow AI adopter, but I have found plenty of benefit from using AI in various applications recently. I haven't come close to using on the level of some people who orchestrate agents and rarely read or touch the code they are writing, but there have been clear times when I popped into Claude and had it help me very successfully with something that would have taken longer to do without that help. So increasingly I am skeptical of anyone positing that there is no potential benefit to appropriately using AI assistance. I think the author could rewrite around the angle of their perceived negative externalities outweighing potential advantages, but to deny or ignore those potential benefits ultimately distracts or actively takes away from a serious discussion of said negative externalities.

I don't put much stock in the very very frequently cited study about AI productivity included in this blog. It's a single study. The study itself cites multiple other studies that did find a productivity boost in writing software with AI assistance. I don't see the methodology as being very sound, the sample size isn't very big, some of those developers had likely never used AI before so of course they were slower as they explored using a new tool for the first time (which the study more or less writes off as a non-factor). They also used "Claude 3.5/3.7 Sonnet", which is not the strongest model. I personally find the Sonnet family of models not that useful and much more inaccurate than something like Opus or Fable.

The responses to this post made me really sad.

Sure - it was light on the meat, But it's an opinion blog post, not a full article. the author ventures to cite their refs, acknowledges potential bias.. way more than you get with a tonne of front page articles (many of which probably should have been short opinion pieces like this)

Sure - it's not particularly notable or high entropy enough to save, but it's far from offensive or bothersome ...yet all I'm seeing (at time of posting) is defensive dismissals, ad hominems, and echo chamber pablum

Both things can be true.

Quotes study from early 2025. Same group redid study now shows opposite result. “Fooling yourself” indeed.

Anybody actually using AI in anger (to get paid) will tell you AI was pretty bad early 2025. It wasn’t usable till June. By December it was writing most of my code - with significant reviews by me. Now it’s basically getting it right. YMMV.

I think there's a simple dichotomy based on use cases. For things you're already highly skilled at LLMs can be handy but the overall gains, after all is accounted for, are not so clear. But for things you aren't good at, they're zomg amazing. So for somebody evaluating things based on what they do at work (where they're probably quite competent) or on personal projects well within their own domain, then it's 'hey what's all the hype about?' But if you're doing things outside your domain then it's a revolutionary game-changer.

This also explains why an independent dev can proclaim a 10x productivity boost or whatever, and actually seem to be showing that - while major companies dumping obscene amounts of $$$ on tokens don't seem to be have much to show for it.

> These articles are so off from reality

Which ones? That there is no evidence (not personal anecdotes but the numbers) of productivity increase? Or that our subscriptions are heavy subsidized (then try to compare produced value against real price of tokens)? Or that AI companies are burning tonn of cash without clear plan for monetization?

Article has good points which are worth discussing rather than discarding. We need to bring arguments from both sides of the fense.

I appreciate how the author is explicit about their bias.

This opinion piece is more what he wants to happen rather than what's actually happening on the ground

From the article:

> This is why I'm not using AI. I'm not using AI on moral, ethical grounds.

The funny thing is - they are using AI and they will be using even more AI as it soaks into world economy even more; they just won‘t be using it directly. Well, not for a while at least, until practicality overcomes subjective morals.

"These articles are so off from reality to the point that it can't be taken seriously at all"

So you disagree with the quote from Feynman? (the quote that forms the basis of the article)

I'm genuinely curious to know what part of the article you feel is "so far off from reality"?

id say they're not 100% wrong:

- a lot of folks use ai poorly and innudate you with slop, reducing your own efficiency

- because you can just prompt it doesn't mean you should. many let the machine crank out tokens until it works, rather than thinking about the problem first.

of course, if AI solves my second point automatically, it'll solve the first as well, and we'll call that AGI. But we don't have that yet.

I stopped reading at the productivity comment, it's just deeply unserious stuff.

I feel sorry for anyone who isn’t experiencing the gains I’m experiencing. I can see why AI could suck in massive teams, or software with very messy and inconsistent architecture. As a 2 man developer team working on a mono repo with clear and simple architecture, consistent schema conventions, and heavy context available, it’s becoming ludicrous how fast we can pump out stable features. We must be 3-4x faster at this point. I had estimated that I would have to take on at least 2 or 3 more developers at X customers, now it seems at even double that quantity of customers we’ll be absolutely fine with just 2 developers. It’s been a tremendous boon for my small business, beyond any possible imagination. And then all the time I hear the claim that there’s no productivity gain to be had. I guess me and my customers are living some kind of mass delusion.

Just the other day there was data corruption discovered and a relatively urgent fix required. Just a few years ago I would have been working deep into the night to make sure everything was fixed for the morning. Within an hour Fable had it all wrapped up neatly and the fix deployed…

I find it fascinating how humans search for meaning in the unlikeliest of places, and how ancient tribal instincts will turn anything, anything at all, into an excuse for an in-group, an out-group, and a search for kinship on the most ridiculous little hill.

This "Anti AI Social Club" is just the latest example, and reality has nothing to do with it. Denying reality might just be the whole point.

It's a very human thing really.

> Why is one side of them automatically delusional? Could they know something you don't?

I wrote and deleted a couple of answers to this - they didn't satisfy, so I'll just be honest.

No, they don't know anything I don't know. There's now only one reason for denying that AI is helpful in software engineering, and that is emotional, be it fear of change or cultural point-scoring.

The only honest answer to the question, "Is modern frontier AI helpful in most software engineering?" is "Yes, of course it is." Anyone answering differently than that is, by now, simply wrong. Why they are wrong may vary, but they are wrong.