The AI Productivity Illusion

cyanydeez

bike shedding with 28 agents lets you do nothing at scale

ryukoposting

Over the last year I have seen an astonishing spike in poor-quality output within multiple employers. The problem with AI coding, ticket filing, etc is that you must review it afterward, but review would take nearly as long as just doing it yourself. The 10x productivity gain becomes 1.05x. The adopted solution to this, to meet internal targets, is to accept reduced quality. Flood the ticketing system with bogus reports, each with 5 paragraphs of technobabble. In response, you get similarly faulty AI-driven triage tools to deal with the slop. But the triage tools have the same problem: they just don't work that well. Plenty of garbage gets through, and plenty of actual issues get filtered out. The first movers get some eye-popping numbers to show management, but the aggregate productivity of the corporation is unchanged at best. So is the productivity increase an illusion? Depends how you look at it. Is the productivity boost for the corporation an illusion? Yes. But, most ICs are measured by tickets closed, commits pushed, lines of code written, and tokens used. Like it or not, that is the definition of "productivity" that has been given to ICs. They're just doing what they're told.

akagusu

This particular phrase captured my attention: > Productivity Is About (Much) More than Finishing Tasks Quickly I read something similar in the book The Goal from Eliyahu Goldratt more than 20 year ago. You can be highly productive and yet produce nothing of value.

lilerjee

Economic productivity is an interesting perspective. I think you are right. Current AI spends too many resources but gets too few values (real values). Too much hype in the process of AI development. If analyzing the basic theory of LLM or AI (second hand data, data conversion, cognitive bias, etc.), this will make it more persuasive.

ares623

AI productivity only works if you were the only person in the world using it and no-one else was aware of it. You will look like a wizard, passing off slop to others who are too amazed and ignorant to know any better. The fact that that is exactly what is happening (everyone passing off slop to everyone else and pretending either they didn't use AI or it isn't slop actually) is telling. The mistake was giving it to everyone too early too fast. "If everyone is super, no one will be"

pir8life4me

I can do a nice task with AI but can't easily schedule it. Enterprise controls make what could be a simple cron job into a nearly impossible scheduled task. So AI has to be one shot for me where I use it. So productivity is dramatically lower if I have to manually track and execute tasks as some kind of human scheduler system.

chrisjj

> the mere fact that AI allows people to work faster It doesn't. It just lets them work less.

Mathnerd314

I think this calculation is bad? I mean, they take sand and produce AI chips, and then the AI chips turn electricity into entertainment. So highly productive use of resources. Global entertainment industry is $3 trillion, easily justifies investment when combined with coding usage. So restructuring the economy etc. - those are moonshots that are like the cherry on top.

whateveracct

coding wasn't ever the bottleneck or even a large contributor to outcomes. same for lots of this other stuff LLMs do. so even if you 10x your coding, you aren't gonna have an appreciable effect on total output