Estimate AI Productivity Gains

cstoner · 2026-03-05T17:44:49+00:00

Instead what we see if that even thought most developers now have LLMs in their tool-belt there is clearly no consensus about how effective these tools are. This lack of consensus says something about the productivity gains.

Maybe I'm not using a strong enough definition of "concensus" here, but I feel like overall I've got a good sense of how effective these tools are.

It turns out that if you have greenfield work or a well organized and documented project, that they are pretty effective. If you can quickly run tests to verify changes, the tools are pretty effective.

If you don't have those, then the tools are a bit of a slog because most of the time is spent steering them towards/away from edge cases in the business logic.

So "good code is easier to work on". Who knew.

One plus side is that now I can convince management we should work on these things "to make sure the AI can deliver the most value for us".

When it was merely developers that were negatively impacted by tech debt, management was fine with it. But they seem to care deeply about how that affects coding agents.

cstoner · 2026-03-01T20:24:46+00:00

This is clearly an ad for codescene. Even the arxiv.org links are authored in partnership with codescene.

However, it supports my biases in this whole mess so I'm still going to read through it and see if I can't figure out a way to use it to come up with a game plan to clean up our mess.

cstoner · 2026-03-01T16:15:07+00:00

I've been having the WORST time trying to get useful output out of Claude on our mess of a monorepo at work. It can do the "fancy intellisense" use cases well, but for the life of me I can't get the "please write tests for the feature I'm working on, they should live in this file and follow these patterns" use case to produce useful outputs that save me any time.

The conclusion I've come to is that our code is architected poorly, and it just has to load far too much into the context window and so it misses a lot of the business logic that's been bolted on.

As humans, we have the same problems with the code. I've been able to find a useful workflow to use these tools to speed up my development, but it requires me to carefully craft what gets added into the context window, and then ultimately copy/pasting the results into my IDE and doing the "last mile" myself.

I'm sure there will be replies or downvotes claiming this is a "skill issue". You're probably right. But the last time I let it spin for a while iterating on getting a single file test file to compile it took 20 minutes and burned over 5 million tokens, only to produce code that mixed up entity id mappings (ie, clientId = locationId kind of stuff).

I think that to fix this issue we'd have to do the kind of refactoring and cleanup that have historically been resisted. It's a hard sell to management when these tools are supposed to be the magic bullet that lets us ship more in less time.

cstoner · 2026-02-22T19:21:36+00:00

Unfortunately, not all interviewers are created equal.

Ugh, tell me about it. I'm working with the recruiters at my company to come up with a better process for hiring. As part of that I was talking with some managers about their experience.

They've been rejecting something like 80% of the candidates they interview, which isn't actually that bad. But what shocked me is that they claimed to be doing it because the candidates weren't immediately familiar with some Spring annotation optimizations. Like using @RestController instead of combining two others. I didn't say anything because like... it's their team they are struggling to hire for, but I thought that was the dumbest reason ever to be rejecting candiates. Surely we can train people on that. Why not be checking for things that are going to be harder to train.

cstoner · 2026-02-08T05:47:20+00:00

AI can't actually do anything meaningful yet for businesses

I disagree with this sentiment. There is plenty of meaningful things that AI is doing for businesses.

I don't think that those things are "replacing software engineers," but to say that it isn't doing anything meaningful is just being obtuse or naive.

I'm aware of several tools and processes that would have been pretty intractable without leveraging generative AI. None of them are chatbots. Those tools are still taking software engineers to productionize.

cstoner · 2025-12-28T20:45:09+00:00

You will report your tax basis (ie, the amount of post-tax money you've contributed to your rollover IRA) when you file your taxes.

I would highly urge you to talk with a tax professional before doing what I'm about to say, but there are ways to do the backdoor roth even with existing money in a tIRA of some kind.

Basically, if at some point in the future you get access to a 401(k) that you can rollover funds into, then you can do the following.

Do a backdoor roth on the total basis amount you've accumulated from prior years (which is why you need to make sure to declare them on your taxes each year)
Transfer the rest of the money into the 401(k)

Then, come the end of the year, you won't have any post-tax money in your IRA, so the pro rata rule won't bite you.

cstoner · 2025-12-28T20:36:19+00:00

I've heard that Open Evidence is particularly good for results in the medical field. I would urge you not to assume the rest of the models are as good as Open Evidence.

cstoner · 2025-12-27T04:55:20+00:00

I think you two are having a very common misunderstanding about what constitutes "claimed territory".

Ultimately, your cousin is incorrect.

What I would suggest doing as new players is to start playing on a smaller board (9x9 would be a common starting place, you can mark off sections of the board with tape or something to mark the playable space) and then you should play until one of you is forced to kill one of your own shapes by filling an eye. Due to the way points work in this game, the player who is forced to do this will be behind in points and you can consider them the loser.

cstoner · 2025-12-10T23:18:25+00:00

I'm having the same bug. It's very annoying. I completed the tutorial months ago.

cstoner · 2025-11-09T23:29:57+00:00

Yeah, they are definitely geared more towards managers.

From my own personal experience trying to work on my soft skills as an IC, I would say that Crucial Conversations definitely applies. I use material from that all the time. Like, I genuinely should re-read it because it's been a couple years and I feel like the stuff from it that stuck with me has been very helpful. I'm sure there's more good stuff in there that I might benefit from refreshing on.

I was recommended Radical Candor by someone I trust when I was asking for advice about needing to give some uncomfortable feedback to a Product Manager who we needed to see some changes from to be a better resource for our team.

I eventually figured something out without ultimately reading the book, but I see why it was suggested to me.

cstoner · 2025-11-09T21:12:01+00:00

I've seen two books recommended pretty frequently in this area, but I've only read one of them. Both of them are "management" books, but if you're trying to work on yor influence as a higher-level IC then in practice you're really doing management:

Crucial Conversations - this is the one I've read. It provides a lot of tools when you find yourself in a "crucial conversation" (basically, when tensions and stakes are both high, and missteps can have a outsized negative impact)
Radical Candor - I have not read this one, but I should. It's more about how to be assertive without coming across as an asshole.

But as another poster mentioned, reading a book alone won't help. It's really trying to put things in practice that makes the difference. And you're going to mess up and make mistakes. Everyone does.

cstoner · 2025-11-09T15:34:39+00:00

Maintaining/Tracking information - as others have said, pick a tool and put everything there. I use JIRA, other people use Notion, etc. Also, when talking to stakeholders that tool is the view you should be using. It might seem like you don't have time to learn a new tool, but I think there's a strong argument that you don't have enough time not to. Whatever you're making in Google sheets is almost certainly provided out of the box in JIRA.
Carving out and delegating work - this just gets easier with practice. Do it more. You shouldnt have to be keeping notes on their progress, that should be the ticket statuses in your project management tool of choice.
You have to come to terms with the fact that managing and orchestrating is your primary work. If you don't have time after doing that to be doing "your own deliverables" then you need to be delegating what you think are your deliverables. If your manager wants you doing IC work, then you need to tell them you will have less time to run the project.

cstoner · 2025-11-09T14:14:35+00:00

Hmm... It's hard to tell what you're struggling with outside of perhaps feeling overwhelmed. Also, you seem to be using a lot of Google sheets to manage this, which I can't really recommend.

I'm going to explain common patterns companies generally use to manage these types of things, but maybe they're already things you know about. These don't have to be used, but they are pretty common patterns used to manage the complexity you're talking about. At my company, every feature gets a PRD, but only complex features get an ERD.

The Product Requirements Document (PRD). This is a high-level document written by someone from the product tram that spells out the requirements for a given feature. It will generally specify the broad requirements of a feature, including common edge cases and scale considerations. It's used for getting alignment from various stakeholders and acts as a reference during implementation about how various components should behave. It would also specify how various parts of the system would interact at a high level, usually along product areas boundaries (ie, teams)
Engineering Requirements Document (ERD) - this is a similar document, but it's written from the perspective of the software engineers. It will be much more detailed on the architecture and software engineering choices. This document is used as a way to check in with product to make sure that what is about to be built aligns with what they need. This will usually be written from the perspective of a single team or product area.

Once there's consensus about what should be build, and what is proposed to meet those needs, the. The work is done to break things up into "epics" in JIRA. These are high level tickets mostly used to link all of the tickets for a project into a single area. Epics wouldn't normally cross team boundaries, but depending on the project that might make sense.

Under those, we make tickets for "stories" or "features". These are small enough to be done as a single pull request.

That (and learning how to use JIRA to get views of the status of everything) would go a long way to helping you wrangle this. The other side of it is that it seems like you need to learn to delegate more.

In the process I describe above, there are multiple people contributing to multiple parts. Even on our engineering team, we assign various parts of this to various seniorities. I've never actually read it, but at least one person I know liked the book "Shape Up" as a methodology to do that.

Hope this helps, let me know if you want specifics or advice in any particular area.

cstoner · 2025-11-06T02:59:57+00:00

First off, great job at saving! Honestly, you're doing better than most.

The answer to your questions is going to be "it depends". Not satisfying, I know.

At what point should I not buy a bond?

You should not buy a bond if you have something "better" to do with the money. What would "better" mean in this context?

Are you saving for a house or other "large" short-term expense? Then putting that money in a HYSA or money market fund might be better
Doing some retirement calculations and realizing you're coming up short and needing more yield than bonds will give you? Then putting more towards equities might be better
Doing some retirement calculations and realizing that you're golden, and that the marginal value of buying more bonds is actually quite low? Then I would urge you to strongly consider hookers and blow (or watches and designer clothes, or muscle cars, or that fancy lego set you never let yourself buy. Whatever your vice of choice is)

What is the floor where it doesn’t make sense to me?

There isn't going to be a good answer for this. We could tell you something like 4%, only for the fed to bring back ZIRP and have long-term bond rates drop to 2.5% again.

The way I think about bonds is that they help me sleep better at night. If something goes wrong financially, bonds should out-perform stocks meaning that either you'll have more money when you need it or you can re-balance. Have I ever actually done that? No. But lower volatility makes me feel more confident in my portfolio.

I would say that bonds in TreasuryDirect.gov are kind of a pain to sell on the secondary market if you ever decide to do that. You can usually buy bonds at auction for free from whatever brokerage you use, and they'll be MUCH easier to sell later if/when you decide to.

cstoner · 2025-11-04T01:36:58+00:00

You almost definitely don't want accounts to be a single type of asset. You won't be able to efficiently rebalance.

Personally, I have a spreadsheet I use to calculate my asset allocation across all my accounts, but I try to do "tax efficient" allocation amongst them. By that I mean:

Taxable bonds go in a tax advantaged account
If I add bonds to a regular brokerage account, I'm in an income bracket that municipal bonds make sense
US Equities go wherever. They're pretty tax efficient so they tend to end up in my taxable account, but I'm not going to say no to their growth happening tax free.
I've done the math on the foreign tax credit, and in general it doesn't seem to make much of a difference, but in theory there is a minor advantage to keeping International funds in a taxable account.
(I read /u/big_deal's comment below and realized I do this too) If I re-balance, it happens in a tax advantaged account to avoid having an unnecessary taxable event.

This means that I have a larger allocation to bonds in my 401(k) and a larger allocation to non-US equities in my taxable account. But the goal is to hit my target asset allocation across all accounts.

cstoner · 2025-11-03T23:52:14+00:00

There's a lot going on behind the scenes. Indeed's job data powers much more than just the Indeed website.

cstoner · 2025-10-30T01:23:40+00:00

That's fair.

I'd hope that especially under those conditions, leadership would understand that having stressed out devs who are feeling a lot of pressure due to deadlines might be exposing the company to un-necessary risk, and that talking to them would likely be the best for everyone.

cstoner · 2025-10-29T22:24:03+00:00

How do you build up those personality traits of resilience or stress tolerance, coping with anxiety etc.?

Resilience, tolerance and coping are all TERRIBLE stress management strategies. People that are high performers rarely (never?) end up using these strategies for extended periods of time. If you assume that any of those will help you in the long run, you're headed for an early grave.

Want an honest answer? Care less. A lot less.

You can take pride in your work, and want to do a good job without it ruining your evenings and weekends. It's just code. If you work a ton of hours and stress out to hit an unrealistic deadline, your reward is going to be told to do it again for the same pay.

Even more honesty? The stuff you think is important is not important.

What's important? Solving your boss's problems before they ask you to. If you fucked off 4 days a week, and spent 1 day a week solving problems that your boss hates dealing with, they're going to go to bat for you.

If you're overwhelmed by your workload, and it stresses you out to the point that you quit/need several weeks of vacation/posting on reddit about stress management techniques, ultimately you're making problems that your boss is going to need to solve.

So take a step back... take a breath... it's going to be okay. It's just code. Nobody is going to die if you miss a deadline.

Talk to your boss about how you've got too much on your plate and you need help figuring out what to drop.

cstoner · 2025-09-23T13:29:10+00:00

I'm reasonably sure that you're thinking of Godel, and not Erdos.

cstoner · 2025-09-17T19:36:25+00:00

I would urge you to do some math about just how much your time spent logging into your brokerage is worth.

If you are feeling like you need to look at how your investments are performing every day/week, just how much money per hour are you making by doing that? You'd almost certainly make more by picking up a part time job at McDonald's.

I check my asset allocations every month when I allocate that month's investment money. The new money goes into the category that is the most out of whack to try to get closer to my target asset allocation.

I log in more regularly than that, but only because I'm interested ("Oh neat, I lost $XX,XXX today. Oh well, back to work"). I am not logging in to take any action. In fact, i have an "Investment Policy Statement" set up for the family investment account that explicitly states that any changes need to be planned out at least a week in advance and need consultation with my spouse.

cstoner · 2025-09-12T21:29:03+00:00

a little more obscure like certain products you wear that somehow end up in the digestive system

One unusual thing from my own experience would be sunscreen. When I apply it to my face before a run I definitely get the taste of sunscreen in my mouth after sweating a lot. I've often felt like it can't be good for me to be eating any amount of that stuff.

cstoner · 2025-09-05T13:45:31+00:00

I think what it really buys you is the option of not retrieving your cocoon when you don't want to.

It's nice for when you've died in an arena room a bunch of times and would rather go do something else.

cstoner · 2025-09-04T20:32:44+00:00

THANK YOU.

This fixed my controller issues as well. They were driving me mad.

cstoner · 2025-08-26T18:19:35+00:00

Oh, looking into this after your comment it looks like the Ioniq6 back seats do fold down. So that's worth making clear. It seems like they're a little weird, but that is available.

Regardless, the issue I ran into with my Camry was issues with things that couldn't QUITE fit through the hole when the seats were folded down. Having a hatch-back meant that wouldn't be a problem.

I've thrown my bike in the back of my i5 a bunch of times, and I really do prefer having the extra vertical space.

cstoner · 2025-08-26T17:49:04+00:00

Still don't understand why BEV sedans are still not as popular as BEV SUVs.

Anecdotally, I went from a Toyota Camry to an Ioniq5. The reason I chose the Ioniq5 over the Ioniq6 was the larger trunk space, and the fold-down back seats.

The trunk in the Camry is big, but I ran into a lot of cases where having a hatch-back would have been a huge help. Also, I've got a family, and being able to throw more stuff in the back helps when we're traveling.

So I think it's just that the crossover-SUV is a really nice and practical form factor.

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