this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2026
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Just like all those developers from the study who thought they were 19% faster but were, in fact, 10% slower?
If that study is the only thing you have as an argument you won't get very far (though it is worth it to read the thoughts of some of the participants: https://domenic.me/metr-ai-productivity/).
It is very helpful to me as a developer: I can now write entire custom tools, one-off scripts and services for myself I otherwise wouldn't (because it would take too much time and too much effort), it catches a lot of logic bugs in code reviews as a first pass, it's good at generating unit-tests, etc, etc.
But coding is not all there is. To me as an immigrant, AI-based translation is a godsend. Same for writing scary-looking letters to government officials or applications for apartment viewings. Same for learning a language, actually. When I was looking for a new job - I used ChatGPT's automation to filter out crappy job postings and parse feedback on Glassdoor for the interesting ones. Like, genuinely, if we imagine for a moment that there's zero moral and environmental issues with AI and you still can't think of any possible applications of it for yourself you're either just not doing anything or you're dead.
Do you really think there's only one study that shows that AI increases feelings of productivity, while also slowing down productivity?
I think the question of speed is entirely tangential to what's being discussed here, to the point of being inconsequential. We were discussing whether AI makes everyone's life worse. My point is that I can do stuff now that I could not before, and that makes my life better. It's a very useful tool for me. It also doesn't matter to me whether it makes me faster or slower at stuff I already could do before (but if it makes the experience more pleasant - sure, why not).
It's fine (though a bit unhealthy) if lemmings want to bury their head in the sand, pat each other on the back and try to convince each other that nobody can ever possibly find the evil machine useful, and those who claim they do are just lying idiot AI-bros, but if even my non-technical parents use it - you've already lost the war, sorry.