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Comment by djoldman | Hacker News Reader

> There’s a strange disconnect in the industry. On one hand, GitHub claims that 20 million users are on Copilot, and Sundar Pichai says that over 25% of the code at Google is now written by AI. On the other hand, independent studies show that AI actually makes experienced developers slower.

From the study[0]:

> 16 developers with moderate AI experience complete 246 tasks in mature projects on which they have an average of 5 years of prior experience.

This study continues to get a lot of airtime on HN and elsewhere. Folks probably should be skeptical of a study with the combination of a small number of subjects with a broad claim.

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09089

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Shouldn’t users be equally skeptical of claims by ai companies? Id argue things even out in that case?

Anyone pointing to that as proof that AI slows developers down has not actually read it. See appendix B

"We do not provide evidence that: AI systems do not currently speed up many or most software developers"

Why is stuff like this making it to the front page?

He Looks like he’s a typical software engineer with a very very generic opinion on AI presenting nothing new.

The arrogance the article starts off with like where he talks about how much time he’s invested in AI (1.5 years holy cow) and how that makes him qualified to give his generic opinion is just too much.

Who would be qualified to give an opinion then?

Tons of more qualified people. George Hinton for one. That’s not even the main issue though. I don’t care who he is.

The point is this opinion is generic. It’s nothing new. It’s like someone stating “cars use gas, I’ve been driving for 1.5 years and I learned enough to say that cars use gas.”

FWIW, re George Hinton: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44825249

You're dropping that link as if what he says should be dismissed.

His opinion is different. Worth reading about. His expertise and knowledge is highly relevant. What he says is also extremely likely and true.

I think the sheer amount of hype around AI has turned it into a hallucinating, brain damaged version of a human that everyone likes to scoff at. We're blinded by the significance of what happened here and also blinded at the rate at which this thing is improving in terms of raw intelligence.

The LLM is a milestone in human history equivalent to landing on the moon. But thank excessive exposure to this stuff on social media to sort of dampen the significance.

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