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.
This tracks pretty much with my conclusions for myself, neat.
It’s crazy, I’m fooled every time again and think “surely I must be faster like this” when after a few days an in-depth reflection/looking at actual commits shows that nope, I wasn’t.
The main reason why I still think it’s faster even if it’s “slower”: it does its work in the background while I can do other things, like respond to emails, attend meetings, look at other bits of code, etc. I turn on the audio notification to have to ping me when it’s done.
This tracks pretty much with my conclusions for myself, neat.
It’s crazy, I’m fooled every time again and think “surely I must be faster like this” when after a few days an in-depth reflection/looking at actual commits shows that nope, I wasn’t.
Same. I only use it to write boilerplate now. When it is basically copy pasting from docs, it’s faster at it than me.
Every time I try it to write more complex code, I end up redoing major parts of it.
The main reason why I still think it’s faster even if it’s “slower”: it does its work in the background while I can do other things, like respond to emails, attend meetings, look at other bits of code, etc. I turn on the audio notification to have to ping me when it’s done.
Same here. It’s been trained on so much of that kind of code, you have a much better chance of getting useable code on the first prompt.