A pair of economists at MIT have conducted an experiment designed to determine if the use of ChatGPT by college-educated professionals can make them more productive. In their study, reported in the journal Science, Shakked Noy and Whitney Zhang designed and conducted a study in which college-educated professionals engaged in incentivized writing tasks.
I started using it to jump-start coding projects by writing the boilerplate that I could then fill in and focus on things that were more important. To put it in perspective, I was able to produce a prototype for a client in about two weeks rather than a month to a month and a half. I’d never use it to produce an entire project out of whole cloth, but I’ve found that it’s super useful for getting the big pieces done quickly so that I can focus on fine tuning and making a product better. I also started using it for a starting point in professional letters and other such mundane writing activities of work. So far, it’s been great for giving me a starting place that I can improve from while making my work faster.
So, I’m not surprised that those using LLMs have improved their productivity.