I liked this analysis quite a bit. A few reactions:
(1) I don't think a tech company having a monopoly is necessary for a tech company to stop caring about their customers and focus on hype instead. Plenty of public tech companies do this, just to chase stock price and investors.
(2) It's weirdly the opposite mindset that Bezos talked about in that famous old video where he talks about "creating the best experience for the customer" is his business strategy. Interesting. I think ultimately companies may be misguided -- because, in fact, ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience. And hype bandwagoners may fail because, long-term, customers don't like their products. In other words, this is a bad strategy.
(3) what's weird about AI -- and I guess all hype trains -- is how part of me feels like it's hype, but part of me also sees the value in investing in it and its potential. The hype train itself and the crazy amount of money being spent on it almost defacto means it IS important and WILL be important. It's like a market and consumer interest has been created by the hype machine itself.
"what's weird about AI -- and I guess all hype trains -- is how part of me feels like it's hype, but part of me also sees the value in investing in it and its potential."
The DotCom bubble is an instructive historical example. Pretty much every wild promise made during the bubble has manifested, right down to delivering pet food. It's just that for the bubble to have been worthwhile, we would essentially have had the internet of 2015 or 2020 delivered in 2001.
(And because people forget, it is not too far off to say that would be like trying to deliver the internet of 2020 on machines with specs comparable to a Nintendo Wii. I'm trying to pick a game console as a sort of touchpoint, and there probably isn't a perfect comparison, but based on the machines I had in 2000 the specs are roughly inline with a Wii, at least by the numbers. Though the Wii would have murdered my 2000-era laptop on graphics.)
I don't know that the AI bubble will have a similar 20-year lag, but I also think it's out over its skis. What we have now is both extremely impressive, but also not justifying the valuations being poured into it in the here & now. There's no contradiction there. In fact if you look at history there's been all sorts of similar cases of promising technologies being grotesquely over-invested in, even though they were transformative and amazing. If you want to go back further in history, the railroad bubble also has some similarities to the Dot Com bubble. It's not that railroad wasn't in fact a completely transformative technology, it's just that the random hodgepodge of a hundred companies slapping random sizes and shapes of track in half-random places wasn't worth the valuations they were given. The promise took decades longer to manifest.
It is a valuable and relevant lesson - when something wide and structural manifests (personal computing, the internet, smartphones, AI), lots of people will be able to see the coming future with high fidelity, but will tend to underestimate the speed of change. Because we gloss over all the many, many small challenges to get from point A to B.
Yes, now it feels like something like smartphones came of age overnight and was always inevitable. But it really took more than a decade to reach the level of integration and polish that we now take for granted. UI on phone apps was terrible, speeds were terrible, screens resolutions were terrible, processing was minimal, battery didn't last, roaming charges/3g coverage, etc. For years, you couldn't pinch to zoom on an iPhone, stuff like that.
All these structural problems were rubbed away over time and eventually forgotten. But so many of these small tweaks needed to take place before we could "fill in the blanks" and reach the level of ubiquity for something like an Uber driver using their phone for directions.
> (And because people forget, it is not too far off to say that would be like trying to deliver the internet of 2020 on machines with specs comparable to a Nintendo Wii. I'm trying to pick a game console as a sort of touchpoint, and there probably isn't a perfect comparison, but based on the machines I had in 2000 the specs are roughly inline with a Wii, at least by the numbers. Though the Wii would have murdered my 2000-era laptop on graphics.)
It depresses me to think how much of the 2020 Internet (or 2025 Internet) that is actually of value really ought to be able to run on hardware that old.
Or so I imagine, anyway. I wonder if anyone's tried to benchmark simple CSS transitions and SVG rendering on ancient CPUs.
> And because people forget, it is not too far off to say that would be like trying to deliver the internet of 2020 on machines with specs comparable to a Nintendo Wii.
I mean, we could totally have done that. There's nothing stopping you from delivering an experience like modern Amazon or Facebook or whatever in server-rendered HTML4. CSS3 and React get you fancy graphics and animations, and fast, no-repaint page transitions, but that's pretty much all they get you; we had everything else 25 years ago in MSIE6.
You could have built a dynamically-computed product listing grid + shopping cart, or a dynamically-computed network-propagated news feed with multimedia post types + attached comment threads (save for video, which would have been impractical back then), on top of Perl CGI-bin scripts — or if you liked, a custom Apache module in C.
And, in fact, some people did! There existed web services even in 1998 that did [various fragments of] these things! Most of them built in ASP or ColdFusion, mind you, and so limited to a very specific stack; but still, it was happening!
It was just that the results were all incredibly jank, with no UX polish... but not because UX polish would have been impossible with the tools available at the time. (As I said, HTML4 was quite capable!)
Rather, it was because all the professional HCI people were still mostly focused on native apps (with the few rare corporate UX vanguards "doing web stuff", working on siloed enterprise products like the MSDN docs); while the new and growing body of art-school "web design" types were all instead being trained mainly on the application of vertically-integrated design tools (ActiveX, Flash, maybe web layout via Photoshop 9-way slice export).
> ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience
Funny enough, no "AI" prophet is mentioning that, in spite of it being the most useful thing about LLMs.
What I wonder is how long it will last. LLMs are being fed their own content by now, and someone will surely want to "monetize" it after the VC money starts to dry up a bit. At least two paths to entshittification.
"A junior intern who has memorized the Internet" is how one member of our team described it and it's still one of the best descriptions of these things I've heard.
Sometimes I think these things are more like JPEGs for knowledge expressed as language. They're more AM (artificial memory) than AI (artificial intelligence). It's a blurry line though. They can clearly do things that involve reasoning, but it's arguably because that's latent in the training data. So a JPEG is an imperfect analogy since lossy image compressors can't do any reasoning about images.
The only thing I find bad about Google search now is their "AI" summary, which is often just wrong. I can deal with ads in the search results, I expect them, and I have no doubt ads will be shown in ChatGPT search results too, because they are bleeding money. And ChatGPT is under no obligation to show you anything with any accuracy, which is what the underlying tech is based on - guessing. Thanks, I'll take my chances with actual search results.
> It's weirdly the opposite mindset that Bezos talked about in that famous old video where he talks about "creating the best experience for the customer" is his business strategy.
A big part of hype as a business strategy is to convince potential customers that you intend to create the best experience for them. And the simplest approach to that task is to say it outright.
> in fact, ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience.
Sure. But they don't market it like that, and a large fraction of people reporting success with ChatGPT don't seem to be characterizing their experiences that way. Even if you discount the people explicitly attempting to, well, chat with it.
And there's a part of me that kinda think "lots of money will mean some large scale investments in labs that might result in some rare findings". Even though the hype + investor chase feels very shallow to me too.
Even if hype bandwagon fails in the long term it is still probably an optimal investment strategy which is IMO why we see so much enshittification.
If there is 1 ChatGPT or Amazon- level product a decade, you are not likely to be an early investor in it. A reliable play is to invest in many companies, enshittify them, extract small rents reliably rather than betting the farm on a good product.
"Created a better search experience" sure, just like eating human meat would create a better dinning experience because there is a lot of humans near you, at the end of the day what "AI" is doing is butchering a bunch of websites and giving you a blend, in the progress making you no longer required to enter those websites that needed you to do so to survive, because they are monetized by third party ads or some paid offering.
I don't know if anyone's done research on this extensively, but we seem to be very much living in a "vibe" society all around? the market is more irrational than ever, outright lies can be enough to hype up millions in value, and conversely the specter of bad vibes can tank anything.
Has it always been this way? or am I just slow on the uptake
I have noticed this as well, and yes it hasn't always been this way.
My theory is that we are simply too wealthy. For the average rich person (the top 20-30%), the first $70,000 goes to real companies who sell real things for money. Past that and it all is just kinda funny money. In our society there are actually a ton of people making this kind of money, so there's just this huge chunk of money that isn't really tied to anything real. If you lose $100k on cryptocurrency, or you spend $800 on some metaverse thing, it's fine, you can still buy food.
Of course this is also why people who don't make this kind of money are so baffled (and angry). Hearing that some no product company [1] was sold for billions of dollars feels insane when you're seriously considering the difference between a $5000 and a $6000 car.
> If you lose $100k on cryptocurrency, or you spend $800 on some metaverse thing, it's fine, you can still buy food.
20 - 30% cannot spend $100k per year as funny money, that is more like the top 5% but probably more like the top 2%.
High earners in the 20 - 30% often also live in expensive areas, so their dollar doesn't go as far as some of the more affordable places to live (housing, food, etc).
Some of these investments come back around in terms of savings. Taxes and velocity of money (thus numbers of opportunities to be taxed) have been trending down.
Anyway, it's sorta always been this way. That AI is very much self-hyping might make this time worse, but otoh non-european economies have more ability now to make sure the fallout is mostly confined to the investors.
1/ They tested on 16 experienced developers.
2/ They only used cursor. No mention of other tools at the time. Cursor is notoriously bad on bigger codebases, while even Windsurf (competition at the time) would have shown different results.
3/ They only allowed training for 30 mins on cursor.
4/ As simonw mentions, the ones who improved had some previous experience with cursor.
5/ Yet, the study is definitively mentioned as AI actively ruining productivity and none of the other factors.
> There is more and more proof these tools are not as useful as they are hyped out to be. LLM-based coding tools seem to actually hurt programmers’ productivity. “Hallucinations” are not going away because the only thing these LLMs can do is “hallucinate”; they just sometimes (about 30% of the time, in fact) happen to generate some text that has some connection to reality.
This hurts the article, I think. I don't disagree with his point about companies caring too much about stockholders. But this anti-LLM envangelism just comes across as ludditism.
> This hurts the article, I think. I don't disagree with his point about companies caring too much about stockholders. But this anti-LLM envangelism just comes across as ludditism.
Is there any research out there suggesting LLMs help programmers get stuff done?
I can't say I follow the research closely but I have not seen any.
Googling for [ai llm productivity research] and looking at the first page of results I can't find much interesting evidence. One report says users asked to create a basic web server in JS complete the task 55% faster using an LLM. One report measures "perceived productivity". Students given text writing tasks are faster. One report measures productivity as lines of code written. The rest seem to just be projecting theoretical productivity gains.
> Core Result
>
> When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%.
But surely someone must have also found results showing productivity gains. I assume I was just not looking hard enough.
> Is there any research out there suggesting LLMs help programmers get stuff done?
Any research will be limited by what the researchers control for?
In my personal experience, when I get a well written bug report or hands on detailed logs, my instinct that I feed it to an Agent and let it figure it all out has never disappointed me. It runs in the background while I work on things I instinctively know the Agent wouldn't do a good job of. How did I develop those instincts? By using Agents for like 3 days. These things (especially, for code completion) are ridiculously effective for the programming languages & code bases I work in, if nowhere else.
> Has anyone measured any improved productivity? ... I am a happy Copilot Pro user since 2021, still.
Whether productivity is tanking or not, I will find it incredibly hard to stop using LLMs/Agents just because a metric or three indicates I'd be better off without them. I must note though, it might be too soon to put a mark on productivity as it is a function of how well new technologies are integrated into processes and workflows, which typically happens over decades and not months/years.
The report is definitely worth reading although I don't think the data is strong enough to draw significant conclusions from. I personally think that this should be studied more in depth over a longer time period since the current study had a 50 hour threshold (not exactly but close enough). One thing which is mentioned in the research paper[1] is:
> However, we see positive speedup for the one developer who has more
than 50 hours of Cursor experience, so it’s plausible that there is a high skill ceiling for using Cursor, such that developers with significant experience see positive speedup.
Yeah, author is definitely false here. I have 10+ years of professional experience backend programming and I've found VS Code copilot to be pretty helpful overall. It saves me a lot of time digging through documentation and writing out tedious little functions (e.g. converting dates from one format to another). I wouldn't use it to write anything lengthy but overall it has improved my productivity, though I could see how it might hurt junior engineers.
We do need to start talking about the failure of capitalism. I'm not naive enough to think that we should turn to communism, but it's clear how we're taught capitalism is suppose to work and how it plays out in reality are two different things.
Ideally capitalism would yield better product or services, for a lower price. That's no longer happening. We're getting shittier products and we're paying more. But somehow we convince ourselves that it's still good, because the stock market is going up, corporate profits are going up.
If there was ever any doubt that the hype is the product, then please explain the Tesla stock, 100% hype driven, there is zero correlation between the stock price and how the company is actually doing.
the theory assumes that in a free market, everyone is a rational actor, and that everyone is truthful
we live in the age of lies. you can either keep debunking them to deaf ears, or join the bandwagon and maybe make some money by fooling someone else. the whole stock market feels like a ponzi scheme now.
It’s because capitalism assumes a free market with competition. If you allow monopolies to thrive, you will not get those benefits. It’s just that some of these types of markets have different dynamics due to their structure. E.g. natural monopolies where the barrier to entry is huge up front costs. Interestingly the AI startup ecosystem is raising enough money to surpass the barrier of needing a ton of data to train AI.
That's true but it's not just monopolies per se. Another big part of it is information flow. The kind of idealized free markets that "work" involve relatively transparent interactions between buyers and sellers. Sort of like, well, a market --- an old-fashioned bazaar-type market with sellers offering their wares. You can walk down the line and see 10 people are selling apples or saddles or whatever and you can compare the prices and the products and make your decision.
Even in that setup, people can try to game the market. They can make something that looks like a good saddle and sell it to you and then it falls apart not too long afterward. They can get you to agree to a price but then tell you the stirrups aren't included even though they're attached to the demo model. They can ask for half payment up front while they custom make your item, then skip town.
And mechanisms sprung up to prevent this: regulation. Some are market-internal (reputation) and some are enforced (people can report you to the authorities for selling fraudulent goods, and you can be jailed or whatever).
The problem is mainly that nowadays companies have turned the majority of their innovation energy towards this kind of market-gaming meta-activity. It's no longer about goods, services, buyers, sellers, or any of those things. It's just about finding new ways to manipulate the market itself.
This is what the article seems to be saying, and I agree. I'm not sure I'd call it "hype", though. It's not that "the hype is the product", it's that the market activity is not oriented towards products at all. Products have become like abstract proxy tokens that are moved around to simulate what we think of as market activity, but all the real activity is happening in the meta-market.
> It’s because capitalism assumes a free market with competition
But even in the cases where we do have a free market, we're often seeing one company fiddle with quality, maybe drop the price a little, then the rest quickly follow and price goes right back up across the board.
not attacking your thinking, but the terms "capitalism" and "free market" aren't consistently well enough defined to capture the nuances of what this type discussion requires. At a minimum, capitalism is the right/ability to own something without others taking it from you, and free markets are markets you can participate in if you would like without asking permission from the govt or belonging to a guild.
capitalism works best for everybody on average when free markets are competitive, but when they are not, markets still work, they just work better for some, worse for others but better than nothing, and also overall worse for everybody because markets are not zero sum. The problem with a lot of what-turns-out-to-be left-wing and or populist thinking on markets is the assumption that markets are zero sum, "if there is a winner, there must be a loser", which while an attractive idea turns out to be false.
same is true of the completely overblown idea that people are not rational. people are not perfectly rational, but when it comes to parting with their money they are much more rational than they are not. If it were not true, people wouldn't be living rationally measurably better lives today than 100, 200, etc. years ago. there are many other sources of noise in measuring that swallow irrationality up with the noise. (yes, selling gambling to gambling addicts is an irrational money printing machine, but civilization has not collapsed)
For centuries as capitalism developed from more primitive systems (like feudalism and mercantilism), goods and services that gain value from social network effects were well beyond anyone's imagination. The printing press survived the church's attempts at suppression, but nobody back then could have conceived of a service that automatically distributed copies of your books to your friends — much less one that could profit from knowing who your friends are, rather than from explicitly charging you for the service.
Capitalism isn't a single thing with an approved international standard of implementation. It can be implemented in a million different ways and its possible we just need some big redesign of it.
> please explain the Tesla stock, 100% hype driven, there is zero correlation between the stock price and how the company is actually doing.
They do still have the best electric cars on the market.
>We do need to start talking about the failure of capitalism.
People have been talking about the failures of capitalism long before the word was coined, going back to at least Abraham buying land with silver coins in 1675 BC and Jesus throwing out the money changers.
Although it's a mess, people are generally better off than a while ago or under non capitalist systems.
Capitalism has always exhibited these problems, which is why it’s supposed to be counterbalanced by regulation. The problem is that our politicians have become utterly corrupt, with Trump himself being the epitome of blatant corruption. He understands that exhibiting corruption from the highest levels will cause it to propagate everywhere, bringing the system crashing down. This and the destruction of the Federal Reserve are his primary goals.
"The spectacle is the inverted image of society in which relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people, in which 'passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity'." [0]
I read The Society of the Spectacle too young and it broke me forever :(
No, you listen to me Jack. You promised me that you would never
compromise the product, so do you feel
like taking some action and backing me up on this because me and my product
feel pretty compromised right
now
Richard, I don't think you understand
what the product is. The product isn't
the platform, and the product isn't your
algorithm either, and it's not even the
software. Do you know what Pied Piper's
product is, Richard?
Is--is it me?
Oh God no no how could it
possibly be you? You got fired! Pied Piper's
product is its stock.
Readit News
(1) I don't think a tech company having a monopoly is necessary for a tech company to stop caring about their customers and focus on hype instead. Plenty of public tech companies do this, just to chase stock price and investors.
(2) It's weirdly the opposite mindset that Bezos talked about in that famous old video where he talks about "creating the best experience for the customer" is his business strategy. Interesting. I think ultimately companies may be misguided -- because, in fact, ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience. And hype bandwagoners may fail because, long-term, customers don't like their products. In other words, this is a bad strategy.
(3) what's weird about AI -- and I guess all hype trains -- is how part of me feels like it's hype, but part of me also sees the value in investing in it and its potential. The hype train itself and the crazy amount of money being spent on it almost defacto means it IS important and WILL be important. It's like a market and consumer interest has been created by the hype machine itself.
The DotCom bubble is an instructive historical example. Pretty much every wild promise made during the bubble has manifested, right down to delivering pet food. It's just that for the bubble to have been worthwhile, we would essentially have had the internet of 2015 or 2020 delivered in 2001.
(And because people forget, it is not too far off to say that would be like trying to deliver the internet of 2020 on machines with specs comparable to a Nintendo Wii. I'm trying to pick a game console as a sort of touchpoint, and there probably isn't a perfect comparison, but based on the machines I had in 2000 the specs are roughly inline with a Wii, at least by the numbers. Though the Wii would have murdered my 2000-era laptop on graphics.)
I don't know that the AI bubble will have a similar 20-year lag, but I also think it's out over its skis. What we have now is both extremely impressive, but also not justifying the valuations being poured into it in the here & now. There's no contradiction there. In fact if you look at history there's been all sorts of similar cases of promising technologies being grotesquely over-invested in, even though they were transformative and amazing. If you want to go back further in history, the railroad bubble also has some similarities to the Dot Com bubble. It's not that railroad wasn't in fact a completely transformative technology, it's just that the random hodgepodge of a hundred companies slapping random sizes and shapes of track in half-random places wasn't worth the valuations they were given. The promise took decades longer to manifest.
Yes, now it feels like something like smartphones came of age overnight and was always inevitable. But it really took more than a decade to reach the level of integration and polish that we now take for granted. UI on phone apps was terrible, speeds were terrible, screens resolutions were terrible, processing was minimal, battery didn't last, roaming charges/3g coverage, etc. For years, you couldn't pinch to zoom on an iPhone, stuff like that.
All these structural problems were rubbed away over time and eventually forgotten. But so many of these small tweaks needed to take place before we could "fill in the blanks" and reach the level of ubiquity for something like an Uber driver using their phone for directions.
It depresses me to think how much of the 2020 Internet (or 2025 Internet) that is actually of value really ought to be able to run on hardware that old.
Or so I imagine, anyway. I wonder if anyone's tried to benchmark simple CSS transitions and SVG rendering on ancient CPUs.
I mean, we could totally have done that. There's nothing stopping you from delivering an experience like modern Amazon or Facebook or whatever in server-rendered HTML4. CSS3 and React get you fancy graphics and animations, and fast, no-repaint page transitions, but that's pretty much all they get you; we had everything else 25 years ago in MSIE6.
You could have built a dynamically-computed product listing grid + shopping cart, or a dynamically-computed network-propagated news feed with multimedia post types + attached comment threads (save for video, which would have been impractical back then), on top of Perl CGI-bin scripts — or if you liked, a custom Apache module in C.
And, in fact, some people did! There existed web services even in 1998 that did [various fragments of] these things! Most of them built in ASP or ColdFusion, mind you, and so limited to a very specific stack; but still, it was happening!
It was just that the results were all incredibly jank, with no UX polish... but not because UX polish would have been impossible with the tools available at the time. (As I said, HTML4 was quite capable!)
Rather, it was because all the professional HCI people were still mostly focused on native apps (with the few rare corporate UX vanguards "doing web stuff", working on siloed enterprise products like the MSDN docs); while the new and growing body of art-school "web design" types were all instead being trained mainly on the application of vertically-integrated design tools (ActiveX, Flash, maybe web layout via Photoshop 9-way slice export).
Funny enough, no "AI" prophet is mentioning that, in spite of it being the most useful thing about LLMs.
What I wonder is how long it will last. LLMs are being fed their own content by now, and someone will surely want to "monetize" it after the VC money starts to dry up a bit. At least two paths to entshittification.
Sometimes I think these things are more like JPEGs for knowledge expressed as language. They're more AM (artificial memory) than AI (artificial intelligence). It's a blurry line though. They can clearly do things that involve reasoning, but it's arguably because that's latent in the training data. So a JPEG is an imperfect analogy since lossy image compressors can't do any reasoning about images.
Or perhaps because Google created a worse search experience.
A big part of hype as a business strategy is to convince potential customers that you intend to create the best experience for them. And the simplest approach to that task is to say it outright.
> in fact, ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience.
Sure. But they don't market it like that, and a large fraction of people reporting success with ChatGPT don't seem to be characterizing their experiences that way. Even if you discount the people explicitly attempting to, well, chat with it.
Deleted Comment
If there is 1 ChatGPT or Amazon- level product a decade, you are not likely to be an early investor in it. A reliable play is to invest in many companies, enshittify them, extract small rents reliably rather than betting the farm on a good product.
Has it always been this way? or am I just slow on the uptake
My theory is that we are simply too wealthy. For the average rich person (the top 20-30%), the first $70,000 goes to real companies who sell real things for money. Past that and it all is just kinda funny money. In our society there are actually a ton of people making this kind of money, so there's just this huge chunk of money that isn't really tied to anything real. If you lose $100k on cryptocurrency, or you spend $800 on some metaverse thing, it's fine, you can still buy food.
Of course this is also why people who don't make this kind of money are so baffled (and angry). Hearing that some no product company [1] was sold for billions of dollars feels insane when you're seriously considering the difference between a $5000 and a $6000 car.
[1] (https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/)
20 - 30% cannot spend $100k per year as funny money, that is more like the top 5% but probably more like the top 2%.
High earners in the 20 - 30% often also live in expensive areas, so their dollar doesn't go as far as some of the more affordable places to live (housing, food, etc).
Maybe 0.1% to 1% of us are, but the rest of us aren't.
Anyway, it's sorta always been this way. That AI is very much self-hyping might make this time worse, but otoh non-european economies have more ability now to make sure the fallout is mostly confined to the investors.
Deleted Comment
This comment by simonw for reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44522772
1/ They tested on 16 experienced developers. 2/ They only used cursor. No mention of other tools at the time. Cursor is notoriously bad on bigger codebases, while even Windsurf (competition at the time) would have shown different results. 3/ They only allowed training for 30 mins on cursor. 4/ As simonw mentions, the ones who improved had some previous experience with cursor. 5/ Yet, the study is definitively mentioned as AI actively ruining productivity and none of the other factors.
This hurts the article, I think. I don't disagree with his point about companies caring too much about stockholders. But this anti-LLM envangelism just comes across as ludditism.
Is there any research out there suggesting LLMs help programmers get stuff done? I can't say I follow the research closely but I have not seen any.
Googling for [ai llm productivity research] and looking at the first page of results I can't find much interesting evidence. One report says users asked to create a basic web server in JS complete the task 55% faster using an LLM. One report measures "perceived productivity". Students given text writing tasks are faster. One report measures productivity as lines of code written. The rest seem to just be projecting theoretical productivity gains.
Has anyone measured any improved productivity?
I can see this report from METR that is actually measuring something: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
> Core Result > > When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%.
But surely someone must have also found results showing productivity gains. I assume I was just not looking hard enough.
I am a happy Copilot Pro user since 2021, still.
Any research will be limited by what the researchers control for?
In my personal experience, when I get a well written bug report or hands on detailed logs, my instinct that I feed it to an Agent and let it figure it all out has never disappointed me. It runs in the background while I work on things I instinctively know the Agent wouldn't do a good job of. How did I develop those instincts? By using Agents for like 3 days. These things (especially, for code completion) are ridiculously effective for the programming languages & code bases I work in, if nowhere else.
> Has anyone measured any improved productivity? ... I am a happy Copilot Pro user since 2021, still.
Whether productivity is tanking or not, I will find it incredibly hard to stop using LLMs/Agents just because a metric or three indicates I'd be better off without them. I must note though, it might be too soon to put a mark on productivity as it is a function of how well new technologies are integrated into processes and workflows, which typically happens over decades and not months/years.
> However, we see positive speedup for the one developer who has more than 50 hours of Cursor experience, so it’s plausible that there is a high skill ceiling for using Cursor, such that developers with significant experience see positive speedup.
[1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09089
Ideally capitalism would yield better product or services, for a lower price. That's no longer happening. We're getting shittier products and we're paying more. But somehow we convince ourselves that it's still good, because the stock market is going up, corporate profits are going up.
If there was ever any doubt that the hype is the product, then please explain the Tesla stock, 100% hype driven, there is zero correlation between the stock price and how the company is actually doing.
we live in the age of lies. you can either keep debunking them to deaf ears, or join the bandwagon and maybe make some money by fooling someone else. the whole stock market feels like a ponzi scheme now.
Even in that setup, people can try to game the market. They can make something that looks like a good saddle and sell it to you and then it falls apart not too long afterward. They can get you to agree to a price but then tell you the stirrups aren't included even though they're attached to the demo model. They can ask for half payment up front while they custom make your item, then skip town.
And mechanisms sprung up to prevent this: regulation. Some are market-internal (reputation) and some are enforced (people can report you to the authorities for selling fraudulent goods, and you can be jailed or whatever).
The problem is mainly that nowadays companies have turned the majority of their innovation energy towards this kind of market-gaming meta-activity. It's no longer about goods, services, buyers, sellers, or any of those things. It's just about finding new ways to manipulate the market itself.
This is what the article seems to be saying, and I agree. I'm not sure I'd call it "hype", though. It's not that "the hype is the product", it's that the market activity is not oriented towards products at all. Products have become like abstract proxy tokens that are moved around to simulate what we think of as market activity, but all the real activity is happening in the meta-market.
But even in the cases where we do have a free market, we're often seeing one company fiddle with quality, maybe drop the price a little, then the rest quickly follow and price goes right back up across the board.
capitalism works best for everybody on average when free markets are competitive, but when they are not, markets still work, they just work better for some, worse for others but better than nothing, and also overall worse for everybody because markets are not zero sum. The problem with a lot of what-turns-out-to-be left-wing and or populist thinking on markets is the assumption that markets are zero sum, "if there is a winner, there must be a loser", which while an attractive idea turns out to be false.
same is true of the completely overblown idea that people are not rational. people are not perfectly rational, but when it comes to parting with their money they are much more rational than they are not. If it were not true, people wouldn't be living rationally measurably better lives today than 100, 200, etc. years ago. there are many other sources of noise in measuring that swallow irrationality up with the noise. (yes, selling gambling to gambling addicts is an irrational money printing machine, but civilization has not collapsed)
> please explain the Tesla stock, 100% hype driven, there is zero correlation between the stock price and how the company is actually doing.
They do still have the best electric cars on the market.
People have been talking about the failures of capitalism long before the word was coined, going back to at least Abraham buying land with silver coins in 1675 BC and Jesus throwing out the money changers.
Although it's a mess, people are generally better off than a while ago or under non capitalist systems.
I read The Society of the Spectacle too young and it broke me forever :(
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZFTaEenaHM
Richard, listen--
No, you listen to me Jack. You promised me that you would never compromise the product, so do you feel like taking some action and backing me up on this because me and my product feel pretty compromised right now
Richard, I don't think you understand what the product is. The product isn't the platform, and the product isn't your algorithm either, and it's not even the software. Do you know what Pied Piper's product is, Richard?
Is--is it me?
Oh God no no how could it possibly be you? You got fired! Pied Piper's product is its stock.
We are living in a strange time because there is a combination of fear and greed in the market.
Yesterday I learned that market leverage (credit) is trending towards levels of the dot-com bust and great recession (https://en.macromicro.me/collections/34/us-stock-relative/89...)
When the tide goes out, the real swimmers remain and the tourists leave.
I quite enjoy that time in tech specifically, though I'm sure other industries face similar in-and-out flows.