Personal Experience with AI Productivity Tools: Limited Evidence of Team-Wide Benefits
By
make_it_sure
Baker's choice. Dense with flavour, light on filler.
Summary
The article discusses the lack of empirical studies demonstrating AI's productivity benefits, with the author sharing personal experience that AI tools provide around 25% productivity improvement for development work but less for senior roles involving reviews and meetings. The author notes that while AI tools like opus4.5 initially showed ~10% team productivity improvement, they've observed that junior developers and new hires with limited domain knowledge don't improve as quickly with AI assistance, requiring the same level of detailed task descriptions and catching similar review issues as before.
Key quotes
· 5 pulledI think for myself, it's close to 25% if I only take my role as a dev. If I take my 'senior' role it's less, because I spend way more time in reviews or in prod incident meetings.
Three months ago, with opus4.5, I would have said that the productivity improvement was ~10% for my whole team.
I now have to contradict myself: juniors and even experienced new hires with little domain knowledge don't improve as fast as they used to.
I still have to write new tasks/issue like I would have for someone we just hired, after 8 months.
I still catch the same issues we caught in reviews three months ago.
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