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georgeecollinstoday at 3:19 AM2 repliesview on HN

"You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics "

Robert Solow, Noble Prize winning economist, 1987.


Replies

palmoteatoday at 4:28 AM

> "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics "

> Robert Solow, Noble Prize winning economist, 1987.

Some skeptic was wrong in the past, therefore we should disbelieve every skeptic, forever.

That's the argument, right?

kamaaltoday at 3:30 AM

Oh well had a talk with a director at office. He says, instead of using AI to get more productive, people were using AI to get more lazy.

1)

What he means to say is, say you needed to get something done. You could ask AI to write you a Python script which does the job. Next time around you could use the same Python script. But that's not how people are using AI, they basically think of a prompt as the only source of input, and the output of the prompt as the job they want get done.

So instead of reusing the Python script, they basically re-prompt the same problem again and again.

While this gives an initial productivity boost, you now arrive at a new plateau.

2)

Second problem is ideally you must be using the Python script written once and improve it over time. An ever improving Python script over time should do most of your day job.

That's not happening. Instead since re-prompting is common, people are now executing a list of prompts to get complex work done, and then making it a workflow.

So ideally there should be a never ending productivity increase but when you sell a prompt as a product, people use it as a black box to get things done.

A lot of this has to do with lack of automation/programming mindset to begin with.