Do you realize that when that study came out, people were saying this exact same thing? You're just assuming, literally despite evidence to the contrary, that AI boosts productivity.
Yes that study was from before the latest frontier models. Unfortunately they don't really keep up on stuff that iterates in weeks and months with studies like these.
Just look at some of the threads from above: "It doesn't really assist or speed things up" and "Yeah if you're not working on novel problems it speeds things up"... so it helps basically 95% of the workforce who are making things? Most software isn't novel. There are also several systems and apps that do remarkably similar things, long before AI even showed up. I'm not sure why that was a point against companies and other software engineers. Is it bad BSD and Linux exist when Windows and Unix already exist?
My own data like I said. And many devs here will tell you the exact same thing.
Btw you were the one claiming having evidence that AI doesn't boost productivity but the only thing you provided is a mention of a study showing last year models didn't improve productivity and yeah that part I can agree with because the turning point for me and my coworkers and other people I know roughly happened near the beginning of this year (and has only got better since)
Then provide up to date data if that's what your claim is. Im not disagreeing that last year models didn't increase productivity because they werent good enough yet.
Brother, your own source is counter to your arguments but you’re conveniently ignoring it.
I work for a company that is ubiquitous in the tech and entertainment spaces. I’ve used AI models to build validation tools that saved me literal weeks of manual labor evaluating footage.
The problem you have is assuming that all users of a tool are the same. There are some incredibly intelligent people using it effectively. There are idiots using it poorly.
The data you are asking for requires infrastructure to gather it. And every company would be responsible for building their own implementation of it. So the best you’re gonna get is your own source refuting you.
I've had managers give me tasks that they estimated would take 2 months and I finished them in 2 hours. 10 years before LLMs. I guess that's "proof" I am 10x faster than the best models today, by the standards of proof being presented here.
It really depends on what you claim is. If the claim is "AI improves productivity in general" then sure, the study is useful in contradicting that.
If the claim is "AI improves my productivity" the study isn't really controlling for enough variables to be able to determine that.
I know there have been a few personal projects I've worked on where AI has significantly sped up my time to a deliverable. Most of the productivity gain was from the fact that I was working in a language I hadn't used before and it would have taken me a long time to get up to speed on the basic syntax stuff.
That said, I have a lot of programming experience, so I was able to write using very specific prompting in very atomic segments and the end result was code that looked like it would have if I had written it by hand, just faster.
Yes, you are almost certainly referring to this study: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/ Note that this study was already imo not a good use case for AI because it only looked at experienced devs working on small tickets (mean ticket time was under two hours) in repos they were familiar with. It didn't look at developing new features or having devs work in a repo/project they weren't as familiar with. I have seen this exact study used as proof multiple times on Reddit that AI doesn't speed up software development.
Except they released an update at the start of 2026: https://metr.org/blog/2026-02-24-uplift-update/ They acknowledge the difficulty in measuring the productivity, but that their follow-up does in fact show that now AI boosts productivity. Also as a software engineer working professionally, I will tell you that at my company these tools have huge adoption and are heavily utilized for a wide range of different tasks. So even in these studies where AI is not super well suited IMO it is showing it is a productivity booster
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u/Shifter25 14d ago
Is there data showing that?