How do the productivity effects of AI evolve across successive generations of tools, and to what extent do task-level gains ultimately translate into final outp
Writing Code vs. Shipping Code: Productivity Effects Across Generations of AI Coding Tools
How do the productivity effects of AI evolve across successive generations of tools, and to what extent do task-level gains ultimately translate into final outp
Writing Code vs. Shipping Code: Productivity Effects Across Generations of AI Coding Tools
How do the productivity effects of AI evolve across successive generations of tools, and to what extent do task-level gains ultimately translate into final output? We study these questions in the context of software development, using data on more than 100,000 GitHub developers combined with their AI usage telemetry. In a matched event study design, we find that autocomplete, interactive coding agents, and autonomous coding agents each significantly increase coding activity ("commits"), with respective cumulative effects of 40%, 140%, and 180%. These gains, however, attenuate sharply across the production hierarchy: the 180% cumulative effect falls to 50% for the number of projects, and to 30% for actual releases. This pattern is consistent with the weak-link hypothesis: the strong productivity gains from AI are attenuated by human bottlenecks in the production chain, with an estimated elasticity of substitution of 0.25 between AI and human effort, which indicates strong complementarities. We further confirm these results across four major app marketplaces, finding a moderate increase in the number of new apps but no increase in total usage. Large task-level AI productivity gains have therefore translated only partially into shipped and used software thus far.
AI boosts worker productivity — but does that translate to final outputs? | MIT Sloan
A new study found that developers using AI tools can write much more code than those working without AI, but they don’t release as much new software.
AI Code Is Producing a Quality Crisis Nobody Wants to Talk About
The productivity numbers look great. AI coding tools are everywhere.
No Vibes Allowed: Solving Hard Problems in Complex Codebases – Dex Horthy, HumanLayer
What AI coding costs you | Tom Wojcik
What's the effect of the prolonged AI usage among coders and is it tracked correctly, if it all?
AI coding agents generate more code, but not more software
Study finds coding efficiency gains get "absorbed" by human review "bottleneck."
The Impact of AI Coding Assistants on Software Engineering: A Longitudinal Study
AI coding assistants have become prolific in recent years. Through a longitudinal mixed-methods investigation, we examined how professional software engineers perceive the effects of AI coding assistants in regard to task focus, developer experience, and productivity. Two questionnaires were administered six months apart, yielding 158 eligible participants at the first time point, 101 at the second, and a matched longitudinal cohort of 95. Participants reported spending less time on most development tasks, with 82% reporting less on writing code. We find broader shift in focus from creation to verification activities. We propose a new category of work we term supervisory engineering work, encompassing the direction, evaluation, and correction of AI output. We also identified a productivity-experience paradox: productivity perceptions held stable, with 84% reporting improvement at both time points, yet among matched participants, the proportion reporting worsened developer experience in at least one dimension nearly doubled from 14% to 27%, with flow state and cognitive load eroding while feedback loops improved. These findings suggest that AI coding assistants are impacting both the nature of software engineering work and how engineers experience it.
Adoption and Impact of Command-Line AI Coding Agents: A Study of Microsoft's Early 2026 Rollout of Claude Code and GitHub Copilot CLI
Organizations rolling out agentic command line tools like Anthropic's Claude Code and GitHub's Copilot CLI need to know who will try them, who will keep using them, and whether the tools produce enough output to justify their cost. At organizational scale, token spend can run into millions of dollars annually, so misreading adoption, retention, or impact can make a rollout expensive without changing engineering velocity. Studying tens of thousands of engineers at Microsoft over its early-2026 rollout, we find that first use spread primarily through social networks, retention was associated more with engineers' coding activity than with demographics, and adopters merged roughly 24% more pull requests than they would have otherwise. We use merged pull requests as our proxy for output -- acknowledging that a merged PR is not the same as the value it delivers -- and the lift persists across our four-month window. These results suggest that CLI coding agents are neither uniformly adopted nor mere novelty effects and that organizations should treat visible peer use as central to rollout strategy.
AI | 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey
84% of respondents are using or planning to use AI tools in their development process, an increase over last year (76%). This year we can see 51% of professional developers use AI tools daily.
Does AI Actually Boost Developer Productivity? (100k Devs Study) - Yegor Denisov-Blanch, Stanford
The Economics of Using AI to Churn Out Code Are Looking Worse Than Ever
Anthropic updated an estimate for how much developers will spend on its AI coding tool, signaling that the tech is only going to get costlier.
Why Software Engineering Is Indispensable in the Age of Coding Agents
Can AI make Software Engineering (SE) -- the discipline -- obsolete? And can it make software engineers -- the professionals -- redundant? This paper argues that the rise of capable AI coding...
Study finds AI tools made open source software developers 19 percent slower
Coders spent more time prompting and reviewing AI generations than they saved on coding.
Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity
We conduct a randomized controlled trial to understand how early-2025 AI tools affect the productivity of experienced open-source developers working on their own repositories. Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19% longer than without—AI makes them slower.
