[itqwertz]

The real benefactors of AI in software development are senior devs who’ve had enough of boilerplate, framework switching, and other tedious low-value tasks. You cut down on the former laborious tradition of picking through StackOverflow for glimmers of hope.

[almog]

Yet when you look beyond boilerplate code generation, it's not all that LLMs increase experienced developers productivity (even when they believe that it does): https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089

Edit: Hello downvoters, would love to know if you found any flawed argument, is this just because this study/comment contradicting the common narrative on HN or something else entirely?

[CharlesW]

Is there literally anything other than this single, 16-participant study with that validates the idea that leveraging AI as an assistant reduces completion time in general?

Unless those participants were just complete idiots, I simply cannot square this with my last few weeks absolutely barnstorming on a project using Claude Code.

[steveklabnik]

From the paper:

> We do not provide evidence that:

> AI systems do not currently speed up many or most software developers

> We do not claim that our developers or repositories represent a majority or plurality of software development work

[itsafarqueue]

That study is going to go down as the red herring it is. Shows little more than people with minimal experience using LLMs for dev do it wrong.

[whynotminot]

One of the problems with this study is that the field is moving so very fast.

6 months in models is an eternity. Anthropic has better models out since this study was done. Gemini keeps getting better. Grok / xAI isn’t a joke anymore. To say nothing of the massive open source advancements released in just the last couple weeks alone.

This is all moving so fast that one already out of date report isn’t definitive. Certainly an interesting snapshot in time, but has to be understood in context.

Hackernews needs to get better on this. The head in the sand vibe here won’t be tenable for much longer.

[stronglikedan]

> Hello downvoters... is this just because...

Since you asked, I downvoted you for asking about why you're being downvoted. Don't waste brain cells on fake internet points - it's bad for your health.