I feel I am one of those developers that codes 100 times faster since ai tools came out. I was not slow before by the way. But now I can take a well defined interface and class example, ask gpt4 for a new well defined variant, and out it comes. one tweak and a test later its done.
Some things that would have taken me weeks take days. And some things that used to take days take 1-3 hours.
Novel work can't yet be automated. But... most of the work I do is not novel, and theres files and files of preexisting context for copilot to consume.
As for this effect being widespread and noticed enough to be related to the firing. I dont think its the case.
The people I work with don't seem to get nearly as much out of the tools as I do, and not for lack of trying. They're constantly using the tools too. Even if companies are considerably more productice with the tools, I do not think management would have been attuned enough to performance and costd to have instigated layoffs from it.
You’re benchmarking yourself based on your own experience of course. Not to say this is horribly wrong but yeah, doesn’t tell the rest of us much about productivity.
Like saying that you run faster after a cup of coffee, cool ?
Much of what I've done with ai tools I have had to do before and struggled over days. I was a python dev mostly but I had cases at work where I needed to write java, c, or c++. The genicam compliant industrial camera nonsense it got me through in a few hours was insane. And using a fuzzy logic library. I did not have to spend tons of time reading the documentation, struggling with cmake, or figuring out how to install and link dlls or even syntax for that matter. I can start to type a comment of a high level description of a small codeblock and copilot spits it out.
This works in any language.
It isnt that it speeds up every single operation I do. When I get in the zone I toggle it off. But 80% of the time i hit a snag it instantly short circuits me through the issue. I can and do ask follow up questions about how the thing works so the next time I come across it it wont even be a snag. So I have had slowly compounding speed boosts from it for two years. I code faster with it also because it taught me things, and I have learned when to turn it off (often)
Some things that would have taken me weeks take days. And some things that used to take days take 1-3 hours.
Novel work can't yet be automated. But... most of the work I do is not novel, and theres files and files of preexisting context for copilot to consume.
As for this effect being widespread and noticed enough to be related to the firing. I dont think its the case.
The people I work with don't seem to get nearly as much out of the tools as I do, and not for lack of trying. They're constantly using the tools too. Even if companies are considerably more productice with the tools, I do not think management would have been attuned enough to performance and costd to have instigated layoffs from it.