Rob NapierJul 11
"AI makes them slower.": https://cocoaphony.micro.blog/2025/07/11/ai-makes-them-slower.html
Rob Napier - "AI makes them slower."

METR just released another report, titled “Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity.” The pull quote is: Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19% longer than without—AI makes them slower. I’ve been pondering this one all morning. I generally like their methodology. Obviously you always want ever-more controlled experiments slicing every possible input, but as a real-world trial, the experimental design I think was very good, and the numbers seem fairly robust.

Show threadQuinn “The Eskimo!”Jul 11
@cocoaphony A post came through my feed at one point of an article comparing LLMs to the fun fare psychic, both exploiting our human predilections for fooling ourselves. It rang very true, and I’m now sad I didn’t bookmark it.
Show threadAlan FrancisJul 11
@justkwin @cocoaphony was it this ? https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/
The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models rep…

The new era of tech seems to be built on superstitious behaviour

Out of the Software Crisis
Jona 🐳Jul 12
Show threadAlan Francis
@justkwin @cocoaphony this one https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2025/trusting-your-own-judgement-on-ai/ talks about our ability to fool ourselves too, but not the direct mentalist comparison
Trusting your own judgement on ‘AI’ is a huge risk

Web dev at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland

Jul 11 at 11:18pmWeb
Show threadRob NapierJul 12

@acf @justkwin I didn't find that post very helpful. "You don't know what works for you" isn't really the helpful advice I think it intends to be, and we don't apply this approach to other topics. AI tools definitely do improve my code. I have found specific, identifiable bugs using AI that I had missed in my own reviews. That's not me fooling myself.

But to the narrow question of whether it takes fewer minutes of work to commit a change, yeah, I think there's a real question there.