I could handle this style when it wasn't everywhere. But now I've developed a hypersensitivity and can't bear it. It's like suddenly most of the internet is in a language I can't read.
I always wonder now if an article was written by GPT, or by someone who spent so much time chatting with GPT that they've started sounding like an LLM.
I have genuinely wondered if I've picked up an elevated tendency to say "it's not just X, it's Y". No smoking gun that it's affected me just yet, but it's at least a live enough issue that it raises the question.
I hand wrote something recently that I re-read the next day and I'm worried I sound like an LLM now, I'm pretty sure I always sounded like one because I like it to make exhaustive lists in my sentences, but it makes me wonder if the bot is rubbing off on me.
It's part of our ecosystem now, we unconsciously mirror the patterns that we notice around us. This will include the language of LLMs because it has been invited in.
We always affect the environment, and it always affects us.
I hope that the consequence will be that we reduce the fluff, we stop writing to sound important or to justify a position, but instead use language to operate on the level of insight and shift our future into one that benefits us all.
Let's be very charitable and figure out a scenario where this could be true.
Suppose, a farmer has a farm which produces 1 unit of crop. Farmer uses 0.8 of the crop for subsistence and sells 0.2 of the crop. They get $600/acre.
Now, crop yields go up 5x, so now the farm produces 5 units of crop. Subsistence needs are the same, so the farmer is now able to sell 4.2 units of crop. This is 4.2/0.2 = 21 times more revenue or $12,600/acre.
Hmm yeah I didn't consider that they might use part of their yields in ways that don't generate revenue. However that would mean they use $2,400/acre/month of their crops for subsistence which doesn't seem very plausible, so I agree that's a very charitable interpretation. Would only make sense if their field is only a few square meters, in which case the framing of "revenue per acre" is extremely misleading.
Edit: looks like those numbers might be per year (it doesn't seem to specify explicitly), so it actually might be vaguely plausible (though misleading) if we make several charitable assumptions.
They stop growing a full amount of low value subsistence crops needed to survive and start growing cash crops on some portion or on all of the land. Those cash crops have a higher value.
An example - say you have 4 acres of land and have a family of 4.
In the old world, say you needed one acre per person to grow enough food to the next crop harvest. This would be something like corn or potatoes that can keep. So all your land goes to growing food to survive and you cant make any money.
In the new world, with irrigation, you can do much more - say for the sake of argument, 4 times the crop, in the same space. Now, you only need 1/4 of an acre per person or an acre for everyone. So you grow vegetables that sell for 10 times as much on the 3/4s of land you have that you no longer need to use to survive.
Or even better, you grow high veg on the entire piece of land for income and use the cash to buy your corn and potatoes or whatever as you need them.
Just as all other commercial farmers do across the world.
In other words, solar allows them to become small business owners.
You've added the per month part. The article itself doesn't provide a time period but the two reasonable ones are month and year. For a year, that could actually be a reasonable amount of crops kept by a family for their own consumption and storage for later consumption.
maybe over the lifetime of the installation ? But then they say the battery must be replaced after 5 years... So 5*12 - 30 months = 30 months without paying. So one pays about half 2.17 per day over the 5 years. But that's still about 5 times more than 0.21$/day... I'd love to believe the article, but you're right, the maths seem wrong.
That's in a "bear case" section and honestly is far too bearish, warranties are typically 10+ years for. Unless you buy something super cheap that goes bad and the manufacturer is no longer around.
>It worked because it solved a real problem: Kenyans were already sending money through informal networks. M-PESA just made it cheaper and safer.
>Here’s why this matters: M-PESA created a payment rail with near-zero transaction costs. Which means you can economically collect tiny payments. $0.21 per day payments.
Only one developer in this study had more than 50h of Cursor experience, including time spent using Cursor during the study. That one developer saw a 25% speed improvement.
Everyone else was an absolute Cursor beginner with barely any Cursor experience. I don't find it surprising that using tools they're unfamiliar with slows software engineers down.
I don't think this study can be used to reach any sort of conclusion on use of AI and development speed.
Hey, thanks for digging into the details here! Copying a relevant comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44523638) from the other thread on the paper, in case it's help on this point.
1. Some prior studies that find speedup do so with developers that have similar (or less!) experience with the tools they use. In other words, the "steep learning curve" theory doesn't differentially explain our results vs. other results.
2. Prior to the study, 90+% of developers had reasonable experience prompting LLMs. Before we found slowdown, this was the only concern that most external reviewers had about experience was about prompting -- as prompting was considered the primary skill. In general, the standard wisdom was/is Cursor is very easy to pick up if you're used to VSCode, which most developers used prior to the study.
3. Imagine all these developers had a TON of AI experience. One thing this might do is make them worse programmers when not using AI (relatable, at least for me), which in turn would raise the speedup we find (but not because AI was better, but just because with AI is much worse). In other words, we're sorta in between a rock and a hard place here -- it's just plain hard to figure out what the right baseline should be!
4. We shared information on developer prior experience with expert forecasters. Even with this information, forecasters were still dramatically over-optimistic about speedup.
5. As you say, it's totally possible that there is a long-tail of skills to using these tools -- things you only pick up and realize after hundreds of hours of usage. Our study doesn't really speak to this. I'd be excited for future literature to explore this more.
In general, these results being surprising makes it easy to read the paper, find one factor that resonates, and conclude "ah, this one factor probably just explains slowdown." My guess: there is no one factor -- there's a bunch of factors that contribute to this result -- at least 5 seem likely, and at least 9 we can't rule out (see the factors table on page 11).
I'll also note that one really important takeaway -- that developer self-reports after using AI are overoptimistic to the point of being on the wrong side of speedup/slowdown -- isn't a function of which tool they use. The need for robust, on-the-ground measurements to accurately judge productivity gains is a key takeaway here for me!
(You can see a lot more detail in section C.2.7 of the paper ("Below-average use of AI tools") -- where we explore the points here in more detail.)
1. That does not support these results in any way
2. Having experience prompting is quite a little part of being able to use agentic IDE tools. It's like relating cutting onion to being a good cook
I think we should all focus on how the effectivity is going to change in the long-term. We all know AI tooling is not going to disappear but to become better and better. I wouldn't be afraid to lose some productivity for months if I would acquire new skills for the future.
An interesting little detail. Any seasoned developer is likely going to take substantially longer if they have to use any IDE except their everyday one.
I've been using Vim/Neovim for over a decade. I'm sure if I wanted to use something like Cursor, it would take me at least a month before I can productive even a fraction of my usual.
I recently switched from vim (16 years) to vscode and perceived my productivity to be about the same after one week.
No objective measurements here; it might have even increased. But either way, "a month to regain a fraction of productivity" is extreme hyperbole, for me at least.
That promise is true, though, and the two claims are not opposite. The devil is in details, specifically in what you mean by "people" and "accomplish things".
If by "people" you mean "general public", and by "accomplish things" you mean solving some immediate problems, that may or may not involve authoring a script or even a small app - then yes, this is already happening, and is a big reason behind the AI hype as it is.
If by "people" you mean "experienced software engineers", and by "accomplish things" you mean meaningful contributions to a large software product, measured by high internal code and process quality standards, then no - AI tools may not help with that directly, though chances are greater when you have enough experience with those tools to reliably give them right context and steer away from failure modes.
Still, solving one-off problems != incremental improvements to a large system.
He addressed your point in the paragraph before that. The paragraph from which you quoted was meant to show the difference between your point and the fact that the original research was indeed measuring software engineers.
AI let's people with no experience accomplish things. People who have experience can create those things without AI. Those experienced folks will likely outperform novices, even when novices leverage AI.
None of these statements are controversial. What we have to establish is- Does the experienced AI builder outperform the experienced manual coder?
That's why I rarely use my laptop's keyboard. Always use an external keyboard, and also an external monitor. That way you can look forward and not hurt your neck while also not having to hold your arms in a very high and uncomfortable position. Oh and don't rest your wrists while typing. Also learn to type correctly, and/or use sticky keys (the accessibility feature). Right, then you don't need this stand, though since traveling with a monitor is not practical, an stand that raises the laptop's display is a great thing, so... sold!
Hey yeah I agree, I just thought OP was being over the top with the moralizing. Like, OK its a bit virtue signal-y but so is complaining about it. And its still better than plastic.
I'm not sure that being shipped is much worse than buying from a store that also gets it shipped and wrapped in as much plastic. And if its a town over, you're driving there which is CO2 as well.
Using nothing at all is better for sure and I said as much. Second hand stuff rules.
All in all though, this sort of individual choice is peanuts compared to taking a single plane ride which is itself peanuts compared to what corporations get away with. So imo. having any sort of strong opinion on this is silly.
However, advertising yourself as sustainable (like this store does) is also a marketing move which caters to a specific type of audience. If your products aren’t actually sustainable, it is valid criticism to point that out.
Imagine having two companies selling candy. One says their sweets not only taste good but are good for you, while the other doesn’t make any kind of health claim. Both are bad, but one of them is outright tricking you, which feels worse.
Note I’m not claiming this is what this seller is doing. Maybe they think what they’re doing is sustainable when it’s not. But that’s all the more reason to point it out so they can work of something better.
I grew in poverty. This looks to me crazy expensive. Sustainability comes second. These things are probably made overseas, shipped in a container and distributed in a small package. Then used few weeks, paper will wear out and then thrown away. But that’s how quick fashion industry works anyway.
Edit: Asus laptop had foldable stand included in the paper packaging.
- A shoebox
- An old binder
- A food container
- Some coasters
- Egg carton
- Jenga blocks
- Cereal box
- Legos
- Picture frame
- Tennis ball (cut it in half)
- Door stoppers
- Cake pan
- A screwdriver box
- A few junk mailer magazines
- Crumple up a couple newspaper pages
Or better yet, order one of these and make 3 more with the shipping box it came in. That'll help once it wears out, or you accidentally sit on it.
Not sure how many cereal boxes can hold a laptop... unless you're stacking them flattened, and then you need to eat a lot of cereal, but you can adjust height very precisely. :)
I'm old enough to have owned a lot of paper books at one point, but as a Kindle owner and person who moves every few years, I no longer own any physical books. For fiction and non-fiction prose, I find an e-reader to be strictly superior to the paper version. I've even embraced e-cookbooks. The UX is markedly inferior while cooking, but the convenience of not having to move boxes and boxes of paper around with me is worth it.
this is actually more common place than you might expect. just like wearing tube socks vs ankle socks has become some sort of age delineation, owning books is as well.
I have no books that have any value other than I already own them. After moving across the country a couple of times with them plus all of the other various moves, I have thought about getting rid of them numerous times. The only reason I have not is just sheer laziness on taking them some place. My most recent move left them in boxes and just stored.
I noticed that people like to rank things and often want to know which thing is best so I made an app for it. It started as a little weekend project but I've been getting some positive responses so I might keep working on it.
Feel free to try it out and make some lists and upvote / downvote stuff!
It should be mostly bug-free but it's a very fresh app so it might still be rough around the edges. If it bugs out, feel free to write a comment or ping me on X / Twitter (https://x.com/@tomasz_fm).
