The AI industry's claims about AI coding assistants boosting productivity significantly appear to be massively overblown, per a new report.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/49954591

“No Duh,” say senior developers everywhere.

The article explains that vibe code often is close, but not quite, functional, requiring developers to go in and find where the problems are - resulting in a net slowdown of development rather than productivity gains.

Then there’s the issue of finding an agreed-upon way of tracking productivity gains, a glaring omission given the billions of dollars being invested in AI.

To Bain & Company, companies will need to fully commit themselves to realize the gains they’ve been promised.

“Fully commit” to see the light? That… sounds more like a kind of religion, not like critical or even rational thinking.

  • flatbield@beehaw.orgEnglish
    26·
    22 days ago

    I have a friend that is a professional programmer. They think AI will generate lots of work fixing the shit code it creates. I guess we will see.

    • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
      10·
      22 days ago

      I actually think a new field of “real” programmers will emerge, in which they are specialized at looking for Ai problems. So companies using Ai and get rid of programmers, will start hiring programmers to get rid of Ai problems.

      • blarghly@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        21 days ago

        I mean, more realistically… ai can’t really write code reliably, but if utilized appropriately it can write code faster than a developer on their own. And in this way, it is similar to every other kind of tooling we’ve created. And what we’ve seen in the past is that when developers get better tooling, the amount of available software work increases rather than decreases. Why? Because when it takes fewer developer hours to bring a product to market, it lowers the barrier to entry for trying to create a new product. It used to be that custom software was only written for large, rich institutions who would benefit from economies of scale. Now every beat up taco truck has its own website.

        And then, once all these products are brought to market, that code needs maintenance. Upgrades. New features. Bug fixes. Etc.

      • blarghly@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        21 days ago

        Idk, that was basically 90% of my last job. At least the ai code will be nicely formatted and use variable names longer than a single character.

        • Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world
          1·
          21 days ago

          Oh yes. Get the AI to refactor and make pretty.

          But I’ve just spent 3 days staring something that was missing a ().
          However, I admit that a human could have easily made the same error.

          • python@lemmy.world
            2·
            21 days ago

            Something like Stackoverflow is probably the biggest source of code to train a LLM on, and since it’s based around posting code that almost works but you got some problem with it, I’m absolutely not surprised that the LLMs would pick up the habit of making the same subtle small mistakes that humans make.

        • Baizey@feddit.dk
          1·
          21 days ago

          Idk, I have experienced that it’s (junio w gpt5) actually very happy to use single letter variables and random abbreviations unless explicitly forbidden. And this was for a project I had already written out with proper variable names so far

    • tohuwabohu@programming.dev
      3·
      21 days ago

      Yes it will, while at the same time augmenting experienced developers that know what they’re doing. I evaluated Claude code for a month. Does it help building simple, well-defined tasks faster? Yes. Do I imagine it working well in a large scale project, maintained by multiple teams? Absolutely not.