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.
I’d like to see numbers for inexperienced devs and devs working on somebody else’s code, though.
EDIT: Oh, this is interesting. The full paper breaks down where the time goes. Turns out coders do in fact spend less time actually working on the code when using AI, but the time spent prompting, waiting on the output and processing the output eats up the difference.
That makes a lot of sense, but it’s not what I was expecting. It’s a shame this figure is in percentage. I’d like to know if these relationships still work in absolute terms.
Sounds about right.
I’d like to see numbers for inexperienced devs and devs working on somebody else’s code, though.
EDIT: Oh, this is interesting. The full paper breaks down where the time goes. Turns out coders do in fact spend less time actually working on the code when using AI, but the time spent prompting, waiting on the output and processing the output eats up the difference.
That makes a lot of sense, but it’s not what I was expecting. It’s a shame this figure is in percentage. I’d like to know if these relationships still work in absolute terms.
Thanks for the quick summary! I would probably forget to read this later as im at work right now, so thanks!