Curious whether AI tooling are making engineers more productive with more free time or more productive with even less free time.
Besides not wanting to give most enjoyable part of the work to LLMs, reviewing LLM-generated code is much more daunting compared to writing the code yourself. So, I only use it for a very narrow and specific 2-3 liners, e.g. some arcane Win32 API calls, where I'd otherwise be browsing some old forums.
This is my reflection as well. I find myself spending MORE time reviewing LLM-generated code and also spending time thinking through LLM generated choices, which, at many times are inefficient or bloated. Keeping the LLM on the right rails takes up more time, even with lengthy agent.md and claude.md files to manage behaviors.
I have a rough time calculating how much more productive AI tooling has made me, because when it does save me time (simple mocking, greenfielding, proof-of-concept), - it saves me a ton of time. Conversely when it fails hard on me I can lose a lot of time and also patience.
The trick is developing the intuition to know when to cut your losses early and instead of continuing to fight the LLM, just implement it yourself.
No question. I am far more productive because it lets me get to the answers I need far faster.
I'm more of a iterative solver rather than someone who tries to solve it all into their head the first go. And ai tools are perfect for that kind of approach.
AI made us 10x more productive. Management noticed. Now we are expected to ship 10x more features.
The free time was a lie we told ourselves.
I am beginning to notice more "features" in apps that suspiciously raise questions: "Was that feature really needed and was the AI to sneak it in there!?"
It will be interesting if it leads to a bloat of unnecessary features that customers dont really want
From that standpoint, it's definitely happening already. But removal is easier too now. The real question is whether teams will have the discipline to delete. Most won't, but those who do will build better products.
Prediction. The rise of articles discussing AI attributed bloat and technical debt.
As they say.. Garbage in..
Always the case
Doing less, more productive, but I know its limits. I treat is as my "little assistant" - able to accomplish a lot but without the experience or cognition to make good decisions independently. Been using it a lot for framing out basic unit tests, governance configuration files, bulk renaming, building test files on a known syntax, etc. On the side, I've been using it to throw together PoCs I can quickly test to see if I like my an implementation or need to take my idea back to the drawing board.
AI tools are super helpful if you know what they are good for and where the limits are currently. If you work at a place where your expected "time" is constant, aka has a good work/life balance, then its important to be more productive because your competitors will certainly be.
There are parts of the SDLC that cannot be made more productive with AI - all the human parts, communication about changes, testing often involves manual work, etc. So if you have management that just thinks a blanket X% more productivity is achievable across the board, find someplace else to work, its about as smart as a RTO mandate because they like seeing butts in seats.
Depends on the task at hand.. Some tasks like information collection for planning have definitely improved and made easy, but the quality is still not at a level where you can use it without doing an overview.
Overall, it's just the illusion of more productivity or free time. It's just made grunt work easier while making testing/review even more important than before
I'm still working my regular hours, I think I'm getting considerably more work done in that time.
The type of work has changed too - mind numbing refactors across dozens of files are easier, for new feature work I have time to build several prototypes before picking a direction.
Working more, because of coding errors.
I stopped using AI for projects that I care about. For projects that I don't care about—absolutely, I am working way less.
I'd guess about 20-50% overall productivity, given that only a fraction of my work is writing code.
We have to spend a good amount of time organizing the requirements, as it never comes perfectly from product management, as well alignments and weighting tradeoffs from the architecture.
Reviewing code also became a very daunting and time-consuming task.