alt Hacker NewsThe thing is we’ve always had people who spend more time on their tooling or learn different tools and perform better.
I’ve seen people use notepad and I’ve seen people who are so good at vim that they look like they’re on editing code directly with their mind.
Your particular example is extreme and my guess is the coworker is just not great at debugging. I use Claude all the time for finding bugs, but it fails fairly frequently though. I think there’s probably advantage to having some people who don’t use it that often, so you have someone to turn to when it fails.
I’m definitely not exercising my debugging skills as much as I used to and I’m fairly confident they’ve atrophied.
That, and an objective comparison measuring time saving should include all time that went into learning, configuring, maintaining the tool.
And ideally a sample large enough to capture any wasted time from dead ends in other tasks where the tool may actually fail to solve the problem.
I’ve definitely lost a couple hours here and there from when it felt like I was right on the verge of CC fixing something but never actually got there and finally had to just do it myself anyway.