If that study is the only thing you have as an argument you won’t get very far (though it is worth it to read the thoughts of some of the participants: https://domenic.me/metr-ai-productivity/).
It is very helpful to me as a developer: I can now write entire custom tools, one-off scripts and services for myself I otherwise wouldn’t (because it would take too much time and too much effort), it catches a lot of logic bugs in code reviews as a first pass, it’s good at generating unit-tests, etc, etc.
But coding is not all there is. To me as an immigrant, AI-based translation is a godsend. Same for writing scary-looking letters to government officials or applications for apartment viewings. Same for learning a language, actually. When I was looking for a new job - I used ChatGPT’s automation to filter out crappy job postings and parse feedback on Glassdoor for the interesting ones. Like, genuinely, if we imagine for a moment that there’s zero moral and environmental issues with AI and you still can’t think of any possible applications of it for yourself you’re either just not doing anything or you’re dead.
If it is catching that many bugs, you are writing shit code or your review system blows. Likely both. The AI is about as likely to flag real bugs as it is to flag made up shit, but I still have to waste my fucking time verifying and proving the bot wrong. And you know what it didn’t do? Save me time. Because I had to verify everything it said for no fucking reason.
And my fucking god, don’t let it generate Tests. You get the worst Asserts imaginable. Goddamn. If you aren’t writing your unit tests, then you won’t know what you are testing.
Also, AI-based translation is hilariously awful. Like, let’s assume for the sake of argument that the translation was technically correct (a thing that is not even mostly true), it will always underperform in terms of meaning because good translation conveys the spirit of the words and not the letter. AI translations don’t know shit from Jack because they don’t know anything, nor do they understand the context in which the words stand. And if you are having issues with translating and you’re relying on AI to do so, then how the fuck would you even know it was working correctly?
Legitimately stupid.
But, sure, take out all the slave labor and environmentally devastating issues (a thing that only huge losers do because they are usually friendless assholes that think they’re as cool as Elon Musk and are unintentionally right), and you are left with a machine that is sometimes right but still cognitively damaging.
Just like all those developers from the study who thought they were 19% faster but were, in fact, 10% slower?
If that study is the only thing you have as an argument you won’t get very far (though it is worth it to read the thoughts of some of the participants: https://domenic.me/metr-ai-productivity/).
It is very helpful to me as a developer: I can now write entire custom tools, one-off scripts and services for myself I otherwise wouldn’t (because it would take too much time and too much effort), it catches a lot of logic bugs in code reviews as a first pass, it’s good at generating unit-tests, etc, etc.
But coding is not all there is. To me as an immigrant, AI-based translation is a godsend. Same for writing scary-looking letters to government officials or applications for apartment viewings. Same for learning a language, actually. When I was looking for a new job - I used ChatGPT’s automation to filter out crappy job postings and parse feedback on Glassdoor for the interesting ones. Like, genuinely, if we imagine for a moment that there’s zero moral and environmental issues with AI and you still can’t think of any possible applications of it for yourself you’re either just not doing anything or you’re dead.
If it is catching that many bugs, you are writing shit code or your review system blows. Likely both. The AI is about as likely to flag real bugs as it is to flag made up shit, but I still have to waste my fucking time verifying and proving the bot wrong. And you know what it didn’t do? Save me time. Because I had to verify everything it said for no fucking reason.
And my fucking god, don’t let it generate Tests. You get the worst Asserts imaginable. Goddamn. If you aren’t writing your unit tests, then you won’t know what you are testing.
Also, AI-based translation is hilariously awful. Like, let’s assume for the sake of argument that the translation was technically correct (a thing that is not even mostly true), it will always underperform in terms of meaning because good translation conveys the spirit of the words and not the letter. AI translations don’t know shit from Jack because they don’t know anything, nor do they understand the context in which the words stand. And if you are having issues with translating and you’re relying on AI to do so, then how the fuck would you even know it was working correctly?
Legitimately stupid.
But, sure, take out all the slave labor and environmentally devastating issues (a thing that only huge losers do because they are usually friendless assholes that think they’re as cool as Elon Musk and are unintentionally right), and you are left with a machine that is sometimes right but still cognitively damaging.
We’re not talking about development work, we’re talking about conversation between friends right? I could have misread something though.