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0 pointsamirhirsch8mo ago0 comments

Figure 6 which breaks-down the time spent doing different tasks is very informative -- it suggest: 15% less active coding 5% less testing, 8% less research and reading

4% more idle time 20% more AI interaction time

The 28% less coding/testing/research is why developers reported 20% less work. You might be spending 20% more time overall "working" while you are really idle 5% more time and feel like you've worked less because you were drinking coffee and eating a sandwich between waiting for the AI and reading AI output.

I think the AI skill-boost comes from having work flows that let you shave half that git-ops time, cut an extra 5% off coding, but cut the idle/waiting and do more prompting of parallel agents and a bit more testing then you really are a 2x dev.

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viraptor8mo ago

> You might be spending 20% more time overall "working" while you are really idle 5% more time and feel like you've worked less because you were drinking coffee and eating a sandwich between waiting for the AI and reading AI output.

This is going to be interesting long-term. Realistically people don't spend anywhere close to 100% of time working and they take breaks after intense periods of work. So the real benefit calculation needs to include: outcome itself, time spent interacting with the app, overlap of tasks while agents are running, time spent doing work over a long period of time, any skill degradation, LLM skills, etc. It's going to take a long time before we have real answers to most of those, much less their interactions.

amirhirschOP8mo ago

i just realized the figure is showing the time breakdown as a percentage of total time, it would be more useful to show absolute time (hours) for those side-by-side comparisons since the implied hours would boost the AI bars height by 18%

narush8mo ago

There's additional breakdown per-minute in the appendix -- see appendix E.4!

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