Sourcegraph just underscored why AI coding tools are not driving productivity. Amp Free is a free AI coding tool that will target ads based on your source code directly into your developer's IDE tool - even offering the opportunity for these targeted ads from their selected partners to integrate into your codebase. Not only is this a security nightmare, it's an anti-pattern whose aim is to ultimately create more context switching. Context switching, the act of shifting focus between unrelated tasks, is a significant productivity drain, with neuroscience research indicating that even brief interruptions can take upwards of 23 minutes to fully recover from, due to the human brain's need to recalibrate and reload context. Platform engineering and a focus on developer experience are critical strategies for reducing context switching in software development. In practice, the tendency is to ensure that a developer and engineer's day-to-day tasks don't require bouncing between numerous tools with a "user experience" of multiple logins, browser tabs, or applications. Advertisers are going to expect user engagement so relying on any innate 'ad blindness' is foolishly naive. While 'freemium' business models have typically embraced a reductive user experience, relying on it to spur user growth and adoption in the AI era seems foolishly naive and unimaginative. #DevOps #DevEx #AIEngineering #Agentic #AI
This perfectly illustrates why enterprise should NOT allow the use of freemium coding tools in most cases.
AMP Free's product announcement: https://ampcode.com/news/amp-free