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Comment by CuriouslyC | Hacker News Reader

If you're already trending towards 10x developer status in a niche area of programming, sure, AI will secretly make you less productive (in that niche) while making you feel like you're going faster, for a little while.

For everyone and every other situation, hard disagree.

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We're currently wasting a lot of time cleaning up slop created by overusing AI. The loop is: developer uses AI to create a huge amount of code very quickly. But the developer didn't understand the underlying system very well so the specs generated by the AI contain a lot of faulty assumptions and the code was then built on those assumptions. So you have features that probably shouldn't have existed in the first place, but because they do exist people have provided feedback on them, and the developer then uses the AI to implement that feedback, but still doesn't understand the system so much of the code for the revisions is still wrong. So that individual developer saw a huge productivity increase, in the sense that he generated a vast amount of code really quickly, but the team as a whole saw a productivity decrease.

Ironic plot twist, AI is just exposing your coworker's weakness. They could slow down and understand before blasting away at code, or explicitly hang back and generate tech demos/PoCs for architectural choices while building understanding, but they didn't. The only reason things were ok before was because they were handicapped to a speed slower than their ability to figure things out.

Is it a weakness of the individual or is it a systemic issue where management sees how fast a single task can be "completed" with AI so they set goals that can only be achieved if you offload everything to AI and then fall into the trap I described above.

If management isn't giving people enough time to verify work, that's on them. If management is giving people enough time, but saying "go fast" and people interpret that as "YOLO" that's on the employee.

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