In my personal experience with Duolingo, I found that it isn't an education app, it's a mobile game -- it's completely ineffective at teaching languages but it's quite entertaining and it's great at making you *feel* like you're learning
In a parallel way, it is plausible that the primary effect of AI code assistants is to make you *feel* more productive, to gamify the development experience -- while delivering net negative productivity gains (which would explain the lack of increased output since 2022)
See also:
METR
METR11.7. klo 01.23
We ran a randomized controlled trial to see how much AI coding tools speed up experienced open-source developers. The results surprised us: Developers thought they were 20% faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19% slower when they had access to AI than when they didn't.
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