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Ask HN: Using AI daily but not seeing productivity gains – is it just me?

by grandimam on 6/23/25, 5:44 AM with 41 comments

• by dexterlagan on 6/23/25, 7:27 AM

  I feel ya, but there's a better way. I've been writing detailed specs to direct LLMs, and that's what changed everything for me. I wrote about it at length: https://www.cleverthinkingsoftware.com/spec-first-developmen...

• by joshstrange on 6/23/25, 10:44 AM

  For me, Copilot is the sweet spot (or insert your favorite auto-complete tool). It saves me significant time when coding and I’ve gotten really good at knowing when it pause for 1-2 seconds and then have it spit out the suggestion I hoped it would.

  Agentic workflows are cool and have their place but essentially turn me into a full time code reviewer. Sometimes that’s acceptable/ok, sometimes I don’t like it. Essentially, if the agent gets even slightly off the path I want it on, I need to just do it myself. I give up on trying to prompt my out of a mistake it made. You get stuck thinking “one more prompt/round and it will fix the problem and everything will be perfect”, then you find yourself 4+ rounds in with the agent flip-flopping between 2 things it’s already tried.

• by mittensc on 6/23/25, 6:34 AM

  I am in the same boat.

  I don't need AI to generate code.

  Pipelines are non existant (who wants useless code?, just make better abstractions)

  Copy-and-paste code is non existant - taboo to duplicate, just find libraries to reuse within the project or write them.

  I don't need it to write tests, I want to write tests myself to force myself to think of the problem.

  Code base is large enough that it's generally useless for search (and old tools work much better)

  And I don't see what else it would be useful for though I'm trying. (writing a class skeleton?, maybe?, but then, I can do that fast as well)

• by d00mB0t on 6/23/25, 5:48 AM

  I think of AI as a better version of Google. There's a lot of Hype around AI and productivity, I don't think it will make anyone a 10x programmer.

• by rajeshpatel15 on 6/25/25, 4:56 AM

  It’s not just you,I’ve seen this too. The key is that AI magnifies your existing workflow: if your process is inefficient, AI just automates the chaos. Instead of open-ended prompts, focus AI on narrow, high-friction tasks like refactoring code or drafting documentation.

  Track one metric (e.g., hours saved weekly) to cut through the hype real gains hide in boring tasks, not flashy demos. What specific area feels unproductive for you? Maybe the community can spot the gap.

• by obayesshelton on 6/24/25, 9:38 AM

  I am not using Cursor as my IDE I typically get Claude or Gemini to give me feedback about a specific piece of code.

  However, my biggest gripe with any of the LLMs or Tools is that they do not suggest package / library to solve my issue.

  For example I wanted to do something with GEOJSON and it wrote a heap of code. In most cases for such things I would also use a well maintained and documented package.

  I keep thinking that I need to write something that suggest a package / libary before writing code.

• by throwaway843 on 6/23/25, 2:56 PM

  Everyone's answering about using it for coding and deep knowledge work.

  But what about the opposite: all the other stuff that's surface? Today I had it fill out a calendar, to generate test data meeting specs, to do some simple translation, to proof some reading, to search.

  If there's a task that can be directed and it takes less time to direct than do, it's a productivity gain.

• by repsiace on 6/23/25, 5:52 AM

  I work daily in Cursor, producing around 200k lines of code per week, though only a small portion ends up being truly effective (still significantly more than what I could achieve on my own before). I think we need to adapt to these changes and focus on shaping better workflows to fully harness the potential of AI.

• by herbst on 6/23/25, 7:44 AM

  Auto complete actually saves me a lot time. Discussing and fixing architecture Claude has built often takes just as long as just building it. But tab/automcomplete is crazy.

  (Especially for html layouts and repetitive changes)

• by ifonlyenigmax on 6/23/25, 7:44 AM

  For me, AI mostly simplifies life rather than complicates it. Definitely a productivity helper, even if it’s not magic.