AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

This article is probably not accurate. AI allows me to create hugely complex apps. Apps that I mostly don't understand the underlying code but can evaluate that it works fairly quick and effectively.

That said, in the corporate world, it's not that easy. There are tons of hoops to jump through and context switching all day long. So while my code is 100% AI generated these days, and I can make extremely complicated apps quickly at home, at work however, I'm burned out and completely checked out for the most part, entirely due to AI.

We don't have the same capabilities to burn tokens in the corporate world like we do at home. We don't have the creative freedoms we have at home. AI productivity is just not easily measured.

Read the first paragraph could tell it was AI written. Maybe if it was hand edited to be less AI I would have read more but it looked like the laziest Claude prose.

That'll be a no from me dawg.

A year ago AI wrote roughly 0% of my code and now it writes roughly 100%.

Which is to say any AI study from a year ago is fairly out of date with the speed of advancement.

Saving time does not automatically translate into higher productivity, or even lower costs. That should be obvious?

In fact, I would argue the that with AI, companies should expect to spend more on average, without necessarily seeing any meaningful cost savings nor increase in profits.

That does not mean they can escape this though. It is just like paying for ads, backlinks etc.

This is a 2024 survey, so it predates Claude Code and is mostly measuring GPT-4o:

https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/BFI_WP_2...

AI is a multiplier, not an optimizer.

Engineers, (and many other types of specialists/professionals) can use it to speed up their work and increase output (even increase quality in some cases if done right).

But it's not gonna make inherently inefficient, political, and corrupted internal/company processes any more efficient, it might actually multiply those existing inefficiencies.

This article looks AI-written but I doubt it increased anyone’s paycheck.

I wouldn’t expect productivity to increase paychecks all that quickly except in special cases like that memory factory in South Korea. Higher productivity sometimes eventually results in more revenue and some companies competing for better workers by offering higher salaries (as has happened for software engineers), but this takes time and depends on companies believing that hiring better workers benefits them.

We aren’t really seeing that yet. We are seeing layoffs and companies being cautious about hiring. If it happens at all, it will take time.

>And in coding specifically, the speedup is real and comes with its own bill.

Oh so this article isn’t really about where AI spending is actually happening.

I HOPE people aren’t spending money on AI writing emails. That’s definitely not worth it.

Companies are spending the most on coding tools, not email writing. That’s the main value proposition right now.

It also doesn’t get into media generation and industries that use video or music.

It’s just a really narrow look at probably the worst use case for AI. Useless.

3% of measurable gains is massive in itself isn't it? Taken as a percentage of the total volume of workforce and the world economy?

If we can gain 3% across the board gains on AI based tasks without subsidized expenses, that would be a great win!?

Code isn't the bottleneck. Wait till devs find out making money is actually more work than just producing "systems".

Citing a paper from 2023 and calling it frontier, nah

That study is a weird kind of bullshit which pretends to not understand employer-employee relationship.

Calling bullshit on this.

The size of projects I've done in the past year compared to before is mind boggling. There is NO way I could have reached this level of productivity without a properly trained and properly prompted LLM.

> But in the wild the gains shrink to about 3% of your hours

not my experience at all

> AI genuinely speeds up the right tasks: writing, support, structured drafts.

Fascinating prose, implying that it’s possible that AI can inauthentically speed up the right tasks, which makes no sense at all. Good job Claude!

Just embarrassing to believe a study like this right now.

There are a large amount of anti-AI articles being posted on the HN front page. It is not natural. There is a clear conspiracy, but why, and who is orchestrating it?

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