this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2026
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Programming

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[–] VoterFrog@lemmy.world -1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

More to the point, that is exactly what the people in this study were doing.

They don't really do into a lot of detail about what they were doing. But they have a table on limitations of the study that would indicate it is not.

We do not provide evidence that: There are not ways of using existing AI systems more effectively to achieve positive speedup in our exact setting. Cursor does not sample many tokens from LLMs, it may not use optimal prompting/scaffolding, and domain/repository-specific training/finetuning/few-shot learning could yield positive speedup.

Back to this:

even if it did it’s not any easier or cheaper than teaching humans to do it.

In my experience, the kinds of information that an AI needs to do its job effectively has a significant overlap with the info humans need when just starting on a project. The biggest problem for onboarding is typically poor or outdated internal documentation. Fix that for your humans and you have it for your LLMs at no extra cost. Use an LLM to convert your docs into rules files and to keep them up to date.

[–] UnspecificGravity@piefed.social 10 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Your argument depends entirely on the assumption that you know more about using AI to support coding than the experienced devs that participated in this study. You want to support that claim with more than a "trust me, bro"?

[–] VoterFrog@lemmy.world 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Do you think that like nobody has access to AI or something? These guys are the ultimate authorities on AI usage? I won't claim to be but I am a 15 YOE dev working with AI right now and I've found the quality is a lot better with better rules and context.

And, ultimately, I don't really care if you believe me or not. I'm not here to sell you anything. Don't use it the tools, doesn't matter to me. Anybody else who does use them, give my advice a try an see if it helps you.

[–] UnspecificGravity@piefed.social 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

These guys all said the same thing before they participated in a study that proved that they were less efficient than their peers.

[–] VoterFrog@lemmy.world 0 points 5 days ago

Again, read and understand the limitations of the study. Just the portion I quoted you alone is enough to show you that you're leaning way too heavily on conclusions that they don't even claim to provide evidence for.