AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

https://okaneland.com/study/ai-productivity-roi-at-work/

by ermantrout • 19 days ago

77 94 19 days ago

_pdp_• 19 days ago

Saving time does not automatically translate into higher productivity, or even lower costs. That should be obvious?

In fact, I would argue the that with AI, companies should expect to spend more on average, without necessarily seeing any meaningful cost savings nor increase in profits.

That does not mean they can escape this though. It is just like paying for ads, backlinks etc.

eslaught2• 19 days ago

In what sense is AI like paying for ads? In one case you legitimately lose to the competition if you stop (prisoner's dilemma). In other case, whether and how much you lose depends almost entirely on how much it actually impacts your productivity in practice (or not).

If you're referring to the public perception benefits (supposing those even exist, which isn't clear to me), then it seems easy to make a lot of noise via PR while doing the minimal amount internally to explore the use case and not actually push it as hard as you say.

pianopatrick• 19 days ago

If we assume everyone has access to the same AI tools and those tools do help improve output a lot then you get the same prisoner's dilemma as ads.

The people using the AI tools to improve their output will set higher consumer expectations for their product or service. If you do not also use AI, you will not be able to keep up, and so you will lose business over time.

So you have to pay for AI just to keep up with the other people who pay for AI.

But then if everyone is paying for and using AI to improve their product or service, no one can steal market share from each other. So you are all now paying a lot and AI is doing a lot and the buyers are getting better results, but that does not necessarily lead to better financial results in terms of market share, revenue, costs or profits for the business that is now using AI

uxhacker• 19 days ago

The article gives valid advice in using AI on tasks AI is good at, but the article could be clearer on is what AI is good at and what AI is not so good at.

killerstorm• 19 days ago

That study is a weird kind of bullshit which pretends to not understand employer-employee relationship.

peter422• 19 days ago

A year ago AI wrote roughly 0% of my code and now it writes roughly 100%.

Which is to say any AI study from a year ago is fairly out of date with the speed of advancement.

joe_the_user• 19 days ago

The study is two months old (March 13, 2026).

Edit: Also, it's about writing not coding and it's point isn't that time isn't saved but even with time saved at the task, you don't get a broad decrease in total worked time for many/most workers.

mythrwy2• 19 days ago

Right but it looks back well before that.

strangescript• 19 days ago

The study is "new", but the data they are using is old. It has references GPT-4 for god sake.

czinck• 19 days ago

The study was published in May 2025, and then revised in March 2026. It's based on data through December 2024, so virtually useless for saying anything about today.

Given that, I actually think the conclusions of the article are backwards. If the gpt-4/gpt-4o era had a measurable 3% improvement in productivity, how much more improvement are we getting from models today that are way way better?

steve1977• 19 days ago

But that itself doesn't tell us yet how much time it saved you at the end of the day.

SoftTalker5• 19 days ago

As a developer, on my very best days I probably spent no more than 50% of my day actually writing code. So call it 4 hours of actual hands-on-keyboard coding.

But AI can write code much faster than a human. In 4 hours it might be able to write what would have taken me a week. Or more. Assuming it had proper specifications for that volume of code.

bigstrat20032• 19 days ago

AI hasn't gotten better, you've just given in to the hype.

bayarearefugee2• 19 days ago

A year ago AI wrote roughly 0% of my code and now it writes roughly 100%.

Did the amount of money you or your employer make rise by anywhere near 100% as well?

Because that is really the primary question behind articles like this focusing on the economic benefits.

chapel• 19 days ago

Read the first paragraph could tell it was AI written. Maybe if it was hand edited to be less AI I would have read more but it looked like the laziest Claude prose.

That'll be a no from me dawg.

jmcgough2• 19 days ago

Doesn't read like it's AI-written to me.

SoftTalker5• 19 days ago

I'm 50:50 on it. It's either AI written or written by someone who writes like an LLM does.

yawnxyz• 19 days ago

there's plenty of tells, e.g. "how to actually bank the part that is real" — AI tends to just "throw words out there" with very little information density

you COULD create a writer/reviewer loop hook to catch and rewrite sentences like this, but almost no one does

the result is usually very long essays that say very little (kind of like in grade school where we're graded on "length" so we just add words as filler)

linkregister• 18 days ago

It's been heavily edited to reduce its AI-ness. Some tells remain, for example "Not X. It's Y."

Enough smell has been removed where it's tolerable.

insane_dreamer3• 19 days ago

I think we have to accept that most/all prose in the future will either be AI written or AI edited at least.

Fine so long as the content checks out (!important). I'm not reading it for its artistic or human value.

lazzlazzlazz• 19 days ago

Just embarrassing to believe a study like this right now.

nok22kon• 19 days ago

plot twist: the vast majority of "studies" are like this, complete garbage, but called "science" because they put a table with p-values in

kstenerud2• 19 days ago

Calling bullshit on this.

The size of projects I've done in the past year compared to before is mind boggling. There is NO way I could have reached this level of productivity without a properly trained and properly prompted LLM.

mythrwy2• 19 days ago

I notice the study is "in the past" when models weren't as good and also it appears to focus on office workers writing text.

Ya, using AI to write your emails isn't that huge of a time savings. But coding is different matter.

shimman• 19 days ago

Can you say what exactly you've accomplished with this productivity? Can you provide revenue numbers and how profit increased or does your definition of productivity not include this?

kstenerud2• 19 days ago

Hell no. I want you to doubt. More for me.

suddenlybananas• 19 days ago

Like what

slopinthebag2• 19 days ago

Their tool for sandboxing AI agents, probably.

surgical_fire3• 19 days ago

You will never get an answer.

skybrian• 19 days ago

This article looks AI-written but I doubt it increased anyone’s paycheck.

I wouldn’t expect productivity to increase paychecks all that quickly except in special cases like that memory factory in South Korea. Higher productivity sometimes eventually results in more revenue and some companies competing for better workers by offering higher salaries (as has happened for software engineers), but this takes time and depends on companies believing that hiring better workers benefits them.

We aren’t really seeing that yet. We are seeing layoffs and companies being cautious about hiring. If it happens at all, it will take time.

Notfrontier• 19 days ago

Citing a paper from 2023 and calling it frontier, nah

hackmack102• 19 days ago

This article is probably not accurate. AI allows me to create hugely complex apps. Apps that I mostly don't understand the underlying code but can evaluate that it works fairly quick and effectively.

That said, in the corporate world, it's not that easy. There are tons of hoops to jump through and context switching all day long. So while my code is 100% AI generated these days, and I can make extremely complicated apps quickly at home, at work however, I'm burned out and completely checked out for the most part, entirely due to AI.

We don't have the same capabilities to burn tokens in the corporate world like we do at home. We don't have the creative freedoms we have at home. AI productivity is just not easily measured.

jmcgough2• 19 days ago

This article isn't focused on LLM for code generation.

badgersnake2• 19 days ago

Apps that I mostly don't understand the underlying code

So you’re just flinging tokens at the wall until something sticks. That’s not engineering.

tonyhart7• 19 days ago

You be surprise if people didnt do that

hackmack102• 19 days ago

Honestly, more like being a CEO / CTO that manages a ton of agents and these dumb fucks go off the rails at times and have to be yelled at. It's like herding cats. I've created (AI) entire harness systems, Electron apps, mobile app, SaaS products, video games, MCP servers and more.

Many of these things seem like they have the possibility of being their own products, but honestly, I'm just tired and burned out. I'm mostly building this stuff to remain relevant and prepared to pivot when the inevitable layoff comes. This layoff will come, for the same reason I'm able to create all this shit. CTO's and CEO's think this stuff will really work.

What the C-Suite doesn't know is... this is a fucking disaster waiting to happen. At some point the realization will come, that you have no moat. You have no unique ideas. If you do, they are easily copied. You're also giving over your IP to a company that is losing a fuck ton of money and will keep raising their prices. Worst of all, nobody including yourself will understand what your code is doing or forgetting to do. I foresee a bleak future.

I've had a decent amount of success in this industry. My plan is to ride this shit storm and see where it takes me, or do my best to help bring the entire system crashing down. By that, I mean, I'll release / contribute free and open source software, which mimics every business model that doesn't have a legal or financial moat. For instance... Slack, Miro, Shopify, the million AI wrapper products that are springing up every month etc.

trollbridge• 19 days ago

I have been an AI sceptic for a long time. But we now throw in a native Android and native iOS app with apps we work on for clients now, because the amount of time saved makes it possible.

I could not move this fast on a corporate env though. I mean, I’m using half a dozen Chinese models, a Google AI pro sub, an OpenAI pro sub, and probably will add Claude to the list soon. We have also completely changed our workflows to align with how agentic programming works, including all the way to product management on the first place.

bayarearefugee2• 19 days ago

This article is probably not accurate. AI allows me to create hugely complex apps.

To prove the article wrong even within the context of AI coding (which wasnt the focus of the article) you would have to present proof that creating these new AI apps resulted in you making lots of new money.

lambdaone• 19 days ago

This is the crucial point.

It has vastly increased my hobby programming "velocity", but has improved my day job performance by perhaps a quarter at most; so much in programming is not the task of programming, but mapping the problem and dealing with the outside world.

consumer4512• 19 days ago

I will not be providing proof here, but I went from someone who last wrote production code >15 years ago, to last week, a Fortune 50 demo client saying "this is far better than our internal tool." I am a solo builder.

I feel like I am an outlier, but I do exist.

kevin422• 19 days ago

You'll have to take my word for it because I'm not going to disclose my private business or personal financial records.

But, I'm running a small, two person business and we are being paid by a large company to develop a robotics project. We're working at a very fast velocity and have fielded a prototype within a few months. I've been doing this kind of work for years, and we're more productive than larger teams (8-10 developers) I've employed before. Five years ago, I would have needed at least 4 senior engineers to do the work we're doing now, and we're moving faster than we could even then.

And I'm being compensated at a flat rate by a major company so we're making really good money. The customer is happy with the results. Claude easily writes 90% of the code we use.

aleqs2• 19 days ago

On personal projects AI has multiplied my velocity by about 10x.

In a corporate setting I've seen it reduce velocity by 80% in some cases.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48777257#48778335

softwaredoug• 19 days ago

This has always caught up to me in a bad way.

All it takes is some brittleness to need to take apart the app code and understand it. AI fixes one thing, breaks something completely unrelated.

And usually it’s full of lots of spaghetti code slop. Then I need to find ways to modularize it, make it testable, and at least at some level clean it up.

This is why I say AI sw eng is basically just working with legacy code. It has always turned into unraveling and refactoring the ball of mud to be sane for me and agents to continue working with.

More and more though I just go slower. Write much of the code myself. And setup good validation for the specific parts I trust an agent to work autonomously. I try to expand the surface of things that can be done well autonomously without losing my own grip on the code.

cortesoft• 19 days ago

The article could be accurate but misleading.

It focuses on the average (mean), but does not talk about the distribution at all. It groups ALL uses of AI together, which isn't very helpful in determining if it is worth it or not to use AI for a specific purpose.

For example, these stats could mean every single use gets 3% time savings, or some uses get 80% time savings and other use cases actually take more time.

bigstrat20032• 19 days ago

Apps that I mostly don't understand the underlying code but can evaluate that it works fairly quick and effectively.

This is a contradiction. If you don't understand the code, you cannot in fact evaluate that it works correctly. If that's the approach you are taking, you are doing sloppy work that is going to blow up in your face sooner or later.

asd88• 19 days ago

I agree, but some (most?) software being written doesn’t require a deep understanding to verify because the domain is small enough or you’re not required to solve for all of its intricacies. E.g. prototypes, internal tools, low scale CRUD apps, personal projects, etc.

I believe this is where the huge divide in perceived AI productivity in SW comes from. It’s folks working on low-understanding-required domains talking to folks working on high-understanding-required domains.

skjfjnflw• 19 days ago

Who is "making apps" at work? I keep seeing AI enthusiasts talk about how many apps they are making. I've never seen a real life dev whose job is churning out apps.

SoftTalker5• 19 days ago

I think for some people "apps" just means any software.

I used to work with a guy who at some point had heard the term "macro" in regards to Word or Excel and at that point anything to do with computers was a "macro."

We'd get calls from him at the help desk saying "my mouse macros are not working" meaning i.e. that his mouse wasn't working, in that era because the roller ball was dirty.

sph• 19 days ago

Here's what happens: person comes up with an idea, asks Claude to generate it, gasps in awe, tries out for a few minutes, moves on because the idea wasn't that interesting.

When producing code is basically a solved problem, generating worthless amounts of code is literally one click away. Execution remains key, and still means iterating upon an idea for a long time, rather than generating a prototype with Claude and calling it a day.

Honestly for some it's just a compulsion that they can later brag about on forums, but it never results in anything worth showing the world.

insane_dreamer3• 19 days ago

This article is probably not accurate. AI allows me to create hugely complex apps.
That said, in the corporate world, it's not that easy.

The article is accurate, and describes this very paradox.

aleqs2• 19 days ago

AI is a multiplier, not an optimizer.

Engineers, (and many other types of specialists/professionals) can use it to speed up their work and increase output (even increase quality in some cases if done right).

But it's not gonna make inherently inefficient, political, and corrupted internal/company processes any more efficient, it might actually multiply those existing inefficiencies.

apsec112• 19 days ago

This is a 2024 survey, so it predates Claude Code and is mostly measuring GPT-4o:

https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/BFI_WP_2...

Gagarin19179• 19 days ago

And in coding specifically, the speedup is real and comes with its own bill.

Oh so this article isn’t really about where AI spending is actually happening.

I HOPE people aren’t spending money on AI writing emails. That’s definitely not worth it.

Companies are spending the most on coding tools, not email writing. That’s the main value proposition right now.

It also doesn’t get into media generation and industries that use video or music.

It’s just a really narrow look at probably the worst use case for AI. Useless.

giancarlostoro2• 19 days ago

I use AI to shorten my emails, I write as I talk, and I ramble a lot in my head.

Gagarin19179• 19 days ago

But surely the free version of any of the chatbots is enough to achieve that, right? You don’t need a Pro subscription for that.

kenhwang• 19 days ago

I HOPE people aren’t spending money on AI writing emails. That’s definitely not worth it.

The engineers use the coding AI for everything they don't like to do that distracts them from doing what they like to do. So that's certainly a lot of writing emails, status updates, meeting notes, journaling, Slack messages, and prettifying slide presentations and so so so many docs.

So if you're aghast that hundreds of dollars of AI tokens per engineer per month is being spent on writing emails, you should be even more offended that the more expensive human engineer time used to be wasted on those tasks.

hn_throwaway_99• 19 days ago

This comment is odd given that it's high on opinion without ever refuting the actual data given in the article.

Like it or not, many business people spend hours a day writing emails. The article pointed out specific data showing AI could reduce these hours spent while raising quality.

I'll take the article's actual data and research over your data-free spouts of "That's definitely not worth it" and "Useless".

Gagarin19179• 19 days ago

I’m not saying “It’s crazy to ever write emails with AI.”

I’m saying it shouldn’t hardly cost any money, emails are not token intensive and most people could likely use the free version of chatbots just fine.

SoftTalker5• 19 days ago

I HOPE people aren’t spending money on AI writing emails.

They very definitely are. I'm seeing more and more front-line responses to customer support emails that are very clearly written by AI.

Here's an example from this week:

  Thank you for reaching out and providing all of those tracking and
  return details right away. I am currently checking in with our
  Returns Team to track down your package and see why there has been a
  delay in processing it since its delivery.

  As soon as I receive an update from our warehouse specialists, I
  will reach back out to you directly via this email thread with the
  status of your credit. Thank you so much for your patience in the
  meantime!

Gagarin19179• 19 days ago

But why if that costing anyone money? You can generate like 50 of that kind of thing using various chatbots throughout your day.

You don’t need a pro account for emails.

insane_dreamer3• 19 days ago

Except that many companies are pushing "Use AI for everything" -- seriously. Because the CEO was told by KPMG or whoever that "AI is the future". And so yeah, they're pushing it regardless of whether it makes actual sense to use it or not.

ShinyLeftPad5• 19 days ago

Companies are spending the most on coding tools, not email writing.

They probably spend more on having LLMs just parse documents than writing emails than writing code. You maybe forget that most people are not programmers.

Gagarin19179• 19 days ago

It doesn’t matter what “most people” are, coding agents use an obscene amount of tokens, literally millions per day. Every request to an agent needs to parse at least several different documents/files.

slopinthebag2• 19 days ago

AI genuinely speeds up the right tasks: writing, support, structured drafts.

Fascinating prose, implying that it’s possible that AI can inauthentically speed up the right tasks, which makes no sense at all. Good job Claude!

dionian• 19 days ago

But in the wild the gains shrink to about 3% of your hours

not my experience at all

chilipepperhott2• 19 days ago

In research that studies a large enough population there will always be outliers. Maybe you are one of them. Your counterexample does not prove them wrong.

cuttothechase• 19 days ago

3% of measurable gains is massive in itself isn't it? Taken as a percentage of the total volume of workforce and the world economy?

If we can gain 3% across the board gains on AI based tasks without subsidized expenses, that would be a great win!?

outside2344• 19 days ago

But is it a 3% gain if we include the costs? Or would it actually be cheaper to just hire humans with the money going to tokens?

graydsl• 19 days ago

And guess what humans even learn, get better and might bring more value in the future.

dfsfsdfsdfsd• 19 days ago

Code isn't the bottleneck. Wait till devs find out making money is actually more work than just producing "systems".

OutOfHere• 19 days ago

There are a large amount of anti-AI articles being posted on the HN front page. It is not natural. There is a clear conspiracy, but why, and who is orchestrating it?

AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

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