The trade-off between mastery and speed
With so many overblown headlines, it’s difficult to get a clear grasp of the productivity improvements that AI coding tools like ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot and Cursor bring.
At work, I lead a team of software engineers (and still actively contribute code), and my finger-in-the-air estimate is that these AI tools bring an improvement closer to 10% rather than the 10x claimed by some (for example: here, here, here, here and here). A Google study comes closer to my estimate, estimating an average 21% improvement on developer productivity for users of AI.
I am not in the strongly anti-AI camp. In fact, I believe that it’s made me and others on my team — most of them senior software engineers — more productive. But at the same time, I have become concerned about the longterm effects of being overdependent on AI tooling. In the long run, will it make us worse at writing software? Does it deprive us of practice, making us learn more slowly?
We don’t know the answer for certain, but a study on essay writing suggests that, maybe, there is a risk that overdependence on AI might lead to our skills atrophying. A draft paper published earlier this month by MIT suggests that — when writing an essay — those using ChatGPT…