It is the kind of question that takes into account that people thinking that they are more productive does not imply that they actually are. This happens in a wide range of contexts, from AI to drugs.
It absolutely is a question people ask when suspicious of productivity claims.
Lots of things claim to make people more productive. Lots of things make people believe they are more productive. Lots of things fail to provide evidence of increasing productivity.
This "just believe me" mentality normally comes from scams.
>It isn’t a question asked by people generally suspicious of productivity claims.
Why not? If you ever got an AI generated email or had to code-review anything vibecoded, you're going to be suspicious on who's "more productive". I've read reports and studies and it feels like the "more productive" people tend to be pushing more work onto people below or beside them to fix the generated mess.
I do believe there are productive ways to use this tech, but it does not seem like many people these days has the discipline to establish a proper workflow.
That doesn’t seem to me like a good reason to dismiss the question, and especially not that strongly/aggressively. We’re supposed to assume good intentions on this site. I can think of any number of reasons one might feel more productive but in the end not be going much faster. It would be nice to know more about the subject of the question’s experience and what they’re going off of.
Wow you're completely right and I just completely forgot who you were replying to. I thought you were replying to the person the person you were actually replying to was replying to. Sorry about both my mistake and my previous sentence's convolution!
Maybe you are not aware of such kinds of topics, but yes it is asked often. It is asked for stimulants, for microdosing psychedelics, for behavioural interventions or workplace policies/processses. Whenever there are any kind of productivity claims, it is asked, and it should be asked.
To do that properly, one needs some kind of control, which is hard to do with one person. It should be doable with proper effort, but far from trivial, because it is not enough to measure what you actually did in one condition, you have to compare it with sth. And then there can be a lot of noise for n=1: when you use LLMs, maybe you happen to have to solve harder tasks. So you need at least to do it over quite a lot of time, or make sure the difficulty of tasks is similar. If you have a group of people, you can put them into groups instead and thus not care as much for these parameters, because you can assume that when you average this "noise" will cancel out.
The problem isn't a delta between what got done and how much it felt like got done. The problem is it's not known how it would have taken you to do what got done unless you do it twice. Once by hand and once with an LLM, and then compare. Unfortunately, regardless of what you find, HN will be rushing to say N=1, so there's little incentive to report on any individual results.
