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.
Not a developer, but I do a lot of scripting. I recently needed a yaml file with a whole set of parameters from an excel file for about 600 objects. Copilot generated it for me in about a minute. It took some iterations but it saved me a fuckton of time. Anyway, my point is you need to pick your battles. It’s a tool, so wield it like one.
This is the correct approach of course. But tech giants do everything in their power to convince us that we should use AI for everything, including wiping our asses. And there is a significant number of peoople who believe this. So it’s important to check this and spread the word.
Not a developer, but I do a lot of scripting. I recently needed a yaml file with a whole set of parameters from an excel file for about 600 objects. Copilot generated it for me in about a minute. It took some iterations but it saved me a fuckton of time. Anyway, my point is you need to pick your battles. It’s a tool, so wield it like one.
This is the correct approach of course. But tech giants do everything in their power to convince us that we should use AI for everything, including wiping our asses. And there is a significant number of peoople who believe this. So it’s important to check this and spread the word.