> Significant productivity gains: Over 80% of respondents indicate that AI has enhanced their productivity.
_Feeling_ more productive is inline with the one proper study I've seen.
So in my case, yes but not on activities these sellers are usually claiming.
Can we stop citing this study
I'm not saying the DORA study is more accurate, but at least it surveyed 5000 developers, globally and more recently (between June 13 and July 21, 2025) which means using the most recent SOTA models
1. AI doesn't improve productivity and people just have cognitive biases. (logical, but I also don't think it's true from what I know...)
2. AI does improve productivity, but only if you find your own workflow and what tasks it's good for, and many companies try to shoehorn it into things which just don't work for it.
3. AI does improve productivity, but people aren't incentivised to improve their productivity because they don't see returns from it. Hence, they just use it to work less and have the same output.
4. The previous one but instead of working less, they work at a more leisurely pace.
5. AI doesn't improve producivity, people just feel it's more productive because it requires less cognitive effort to use than actually doing the task.
Any of these is plausible, yet they have massively different underlying explanations.... studies don't really show why that's the case. I personally think it's mostly 2. and 3., but it could really be any of these.
I was very impressed when I first started using AI tools. Felt like I could get so much more done.
A couple of embarrassing production incidents later, I no longer feel that way. I always tell myself that I will check the AI's output carefully, but then end up making mistakes that wouldn't have happened if I wrote the code myself.
Why report to your boss that you managed to get a script to do 80% of your work, when you can just use that script quietly, and get 100% of your wage with 20% of the effort?
It is from what Ive seen. It has the same visible effect on devs as a slot machine giving out coins when it spits out something correct. Their faces light up with delight when it finally nails something.
This would explain the study that showed a 20% decline in actual productivity where people "felt" 20% more productive.
I am proudly part of the 10%!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DevOps_Research_and_Assessment
wiz21c•1h ago
Or the respondents have hard times admitting AI can replace them :-)
I'm a bit cynical but sometimes when I use Claude, it is downright frightening how good it is sometimes. Having coded for a lot of year, I'm sometimes a bit scared that my craft can, somtimes, be so easily replaced... Sure it's not building all my code, it fails etc. but it's a bit disturbing to see that somethign you have been trained a for a very long time can be done by a machine... Maybe I'm just feeling a glimpse of what others felt during the industrial revolution :-)
polotics•1h ago
surgical_fire•1h ago
Much like in person I pretend to think AI is much more powerful and inevitable than I actually think it is. Professionally it makes very little sense to be truthful. Sincerity won't pay the bills.
hu3•53m ago
"this function should do X, spot inconsistencies, potential issues and bugs"
It's eye opening sometimes.
cogman10•44m ago
I've found AI is pretty good at dumb boilerplate stuff. I was able to whip out prototypes, client interfaces, tests, etc pretty fast with AI.
However, when I've asked AI "Identify performance problems or bugs in this code" I find it'll just make up nonsense. Particularly if there aren't problems with the code.
And it makes sense that this is the case. AI has been trained on a mountain of boilerplate and a thimble of performance and bug optimizations.
pluc•20m ago
bopbopbop7•18m ago
Almost every person I worked with that is impressed by AI generated code has been a low performer that can’t spot the simplest bugs in the code. Usually the same developers that blindly copy pasted from stack overflow before.