The productivity mirage: AI tools are gear, not leverage
A thread on 'The Productivity Mirage' is drawing a sharp analogy between AI tool obsession and car modding culture: the excitement is about the gear, not the outcome. The commenter arguing this point noted that everyone saying 'put this skill in your agent harness to change everything' is motivated by the same urge as a gearhead, not a builder with a clear destination. A separate reply drew on Ecclesiastes to make the same point: a blunt iron requires more strength, but wisdom matters more than the tool.
This sits alongside the Kuna decompiler thread, where an engineer wrote about using coding agents to build a decompiler and got a pointed comment: why use an LLM to build a decompiler when you could train an LLM to be a decompiler? The question is whether the productivity framing is even asking the right thing.
The pattern: there is a growing, quiet skepticism on HN about whether the current wave of AI tool adoption is producing actual output gains or just substituting one form of procrastination for another. It is not anti-AI, it is anti-gearhead.
So what?
If you are building AI productivity tools, the market is splitting between buyers who want the feeling of productivity and buyers who want measurable output. The second group is smaller but stickier and willing to pay more. Design your evals and your marketing around the second group, not the first.