/Productivity

The Impact of Generative AI on Software Developer Performance

tl;dr: BlueOptima's study of 200,000+ enterprise developers uncovered surprising insights on the reality of Generative AI: (1) Only 12% of developers commit GenAI code without modification, suggesting limited real-world integration. (2) Modest productivity gains of only 4%, indicating marketing claims are premature. (3) A decline in quality with high AI usage.

featured in #559

Two Workflow Tips

- Alex Kladov tl;dr: “An article about a couple of relatively recent additions to my workflow which I wish I knew about years ago: Split And Go To Definition. Go to definition is super useful. But often, when I use “goto def” I don’t actually mean to permanently go there. Rather, I want to stay where I am, but I need a bit more context about a particular thing at point. What I’ve found works really great in this context is to split the screen in two, and issue “go to def” in the split.” Alex shares an example. 

featured in #557

Modeling Impact Of LLMs On Developer Experience

- Will Larson tl;dr: “Models are imperfect representations of reality, but this one gives us a clear sense of what matters the most: if we want to increase our velocity, we have to reduce the rate that we discover errors in production. That might be reducing the error rate as implied in this model, or it might be ideas that exist outside of this model. For example, the model doesn’t represent this well, but perhaps we’d be better off iterating more on fewer things to avoid this scenario. If we make multiple changes to one area, it still just represents one implemented feature, not many implement features, and the overall error rate wouldn’t increase.”

featured in #556

OpenAI Is Shockingly Good At Unminifying Code

- Frank Fiegel tl;dr: “Usually I would just power through reading the minimized code to understand the implementation. However, I realized that I never tried asking ChatGPT to do it for me... So I copied all of the above code and asked ChatGPT to "explain the code”.” 

featured in #545

How Developers Really Use AI

tl;dr: How much are programmers really using AI? How useful is it actually? We wanted to know for sure. We surveyed software developers to uncover the real impact of LLMs like ChatGPT on their work. From debugging to project planning, the responses revealed surprising strengths and notable gaps. Check out our findings to see where AI shines and where it still falls short.

featured in #542

Advanced Terminal Tips And Tricks

- Daniel Kleinstein tl;dr: “I wanted to share some things I learned at relatively late stages in the game that ended up being significant productivity boosters for me: (1) Use command line editing. (2) tmux scripting. (3) Use fzf liberally in custom scripts. (4) Use /dev/stdin as a replacement for heredocs. (5) Use SSH multiplexing.

featured in #534

Did You Know About Instruments?

- Thorsten Ball tl;dr: “For the longest time, I thought Instruments on macOS wasn’t for me. Whenever I saw its icon show up in the /Applications folder or pop up in a launcher, I assumed it’s part of Xcode and Xcode is an IDE for Objective-C and Swift programmers and that’s not what I do and that’s why Instruments isn’t for me. I was wrong.” Thorsten discusses how he uses Instruments as a productivity tool with anything. 

featured in #534

Six Tips To Improve a Conversion Funnel

- Ryan Musser tl;dr: (1) Identify the friction. (2) Streamline. (3) A/B test your solution. (4) Personalize, where you can. (5) Build trust, when you can. (6). Track everything.

featured in #529

How To Build Anything Extremely Quickly

tl;dr: (1) Make an outline of the project. (2) For each item in the outline, make an outline. Do this recursively until the items are small. (3) Fill in each item as fast as possible. Do not perfect as you go. This is a huge and common mistake. (4) Finally, once completely done, go back and perfect. 

featured in #523

How To Build Anything Extremely Quickly

tl;dr: (1) Make an outline of the project. (2) For each item in the outline, make an outline. Do this recursively until the items are small. (3) Fill in each item as fast as possible. Do not perfect as you go. This is a huge and common mistake. (4) Finally, once completely done, go back and perfect. 

featured in #522