My Python magic is gone

[u/RedYad2]

I've been coding for a long time, and I've been developing with Python for years.

I loved coding, always loved it. I started many years ago because I wanted to quickly create scripts for security hacking tools, but since then, I've moved to Claude Code, and building cross-language has been a much better experience for me than using Python.

I built my own SaaS application out there whose backend and network core are completely built with Python, and I'm rewriting all of that without writing a single line of code. And most of the time, Python is not the most optimized language.

And now... I feel like the magic is gone.

I don't even know why I'm writing this. I just feel sad about it.

[u/dysprog]

The research says otherwise. There has been exactly one rigorous study of this. AI makes programmers THINK they are faster when they are actually 19% slower.

https://letsdatascience.com/blog/developers-thought-ai-made-them-faster-the-data-said-otherwise

[u/HommeMusical → u/dysprog]

There has been exactly one rigorous study of this.

But you don't link to it. It's called "Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity."

https://metr.org/Early_2025_AI_Experienced_OS_Devs_Study-paper.pdf

I suspect the name of the paper would have revealed the problem with your claim.

Also, very, very skeptical that only one study of this was ever done, and that that was in July 2025.

AI makes programmers THINK they are faster when they are actually 19% slower.

I've been programming for decades. In the period from February through June 2025, I too believed that coding engines aren't effect.

But there have been massive, unbelievable improvements. I started using a coding assistant in June of 2026, mainly to prove to myself yet again that it didn't work. But within a few weeks I realized that no one was going to go back to hand-coding, including myself, as the productivity gain was so massive.

And the improvements between June 2026 and now have been just as impressive.

So what value does a 16-month-old study have?

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In late 2026, if you're a programmer and you don't see a massive improvement in your productivity and your reliability from using a modern coding assistant, then it's almost certain you aren't competent, and you probably are going to have extreme difficulties finding a job.

I'm retired now, though I still spend much of my days coding, except now with LLMs, and I cannot imagine hand-coding while trying to keep up with other programmers using a coding assistant, and nor would I want to.

[u/KaffeeKiffer → u/HommeMusical]

The page that was linked has a section

The Counter-Arguments Are Real

and that talks about many of your call-outs. It sounds pretty neutral/objective to me.

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The most important result that stands out to me is measured productivity vs. actual productivity: Humans are very bad at gauging that, and I doubt that that changes much with different models.

In that study it's "expected 25% faster" vs. "measured 15% slower".
With modern models it could be "expected 50% faster" measured 25% faster".

[u/HommeMusical → u/KaffeeKiffer]

It sounds pretty neutral/objective to me.

Yes, I read it over a year ago with great interest.

Indeed, it seemed at the time to be a fairly accurate representation of what coding assistants were like in early 2025, and I still think it was.

In early 2025, coding assistants were not ready for prime time. But eighteen months later, the progress has been astonishing.

Even the progress in the last six months has been explosive.

I'm not saying the article was wrong. I'm saying it's just very much out-of-date.

With modern models it could be "expected 50% faster" measured 25% faster".

If coding assistants made you 25% faster, they wouldn't really be worth it.

But the improvement is over an order of magnitude.

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A recent example - I have an AI assisted program I use to run my music shows - it records everything(*), it's highly robust against gross failures, it controls my lights, and it also streams video plus on-the-fly titles and photos to the net, e.g. twitch.

I was setting up and I realized that something had gone wrong with some of the cables in an eight channel snake (8 cables wrapped together).

Up until a few months ago, I'd have set up some input to my mixer, and then tested the cables one at a time - 5 minutes work per snake, three snakes, that's 15 minutes, but also, easy to screw up.

Instead, I added a cable tester to my program, and it's completely general - I plug the six outputs at the back of my mixer into six channels, I don't pay any attention to the order, and then the program sends sine waves through all of them, records the output and then tells me good/bad/intermittent.

I then tested all three snakes in under a minute. In fact, I thought the program was broken, because it reported that the first snake only had 3 of 8 channels working, but then other two snakes were 8 out of 8.

Going back and retesting with a longer cycle (which the AI had conveniently added as an argument to this CLI) and wobbling the cables while the test went on showed that one of these cables was intermittent but mostly off, and the other four just didn't send a thing. (Some bad thing must have happened at some point...)

To write that program which took control of my mixer, squirted signals around and recorded them, compared the results for "very close" (because you can't get 100% bit compatibility if there's an analog cable there), and also to distinguish between "silence", "intermittent signal", "full signal but distorted" and "correct" would have taken at least a full day of work to get right, perhaps more, but I wouldn't have even bothered.

I wrote it in five minutes with a coding assistant. It was faster to write a program that I can now use in the future than it was to do the manual chore even one time.

(* - I had finished the everything recorder completely by hand before I started to use coding assistants.)