I'm more of a iterative solver rather than someone who tries to solve it all into their head the first go. And ai tools are perfect for that kind of approach.
And AI has expanded my boundaries — for example, I used to know nothing about image processing, but now with AI help, I’ve learned and use the technology and even built an initial product prototype using OpenCV, which helped my side project get off the ground successfully.
We have to spend a good amount of time organizing the requirements, as it never comes perfectly from product management, as well alignments and weighting tradeoffs from the architecture.
Reviewing code also became a very daunting and time-consuming task.
The trick is developing the intuition to know when to cut your losses early and instead of continuing to fight the LLM, just implement it yourself.
Overall, it's just the illusion of more productivity or free time. It's just made grunt work easier while making testing/review even more important than before
The type of work has changed too - mind numbing refactors across dozens of files are easier, for new feature work I have time to build several prototypes before picking a direction.
There are parts of the SDLC that cannot be made more productive with AI - all the human parts, communication about changes, testing often involves manual work, etc. So if you have management that just thinks a blanket X% more productivity is achievable across the board, find someplace else to work, its about as smart as a RTO mandate because they like seeing butts in seats.
The free time was a lie we told ourselves.
I'm wondering what you are doing to feel that much of a productivity boost? There have been three occasions since 2022 where I felt concretely 10X more productive. The rest of the time I'm not feeling a huge / direct impact. While it isn't necessarily drastically more productive in a linear sense (churning out more of the same stuff for instance) things have radically changed nonetheless.
As they say.. Garbage in..
