I said it needs to be measured. But few teams are going to do that, they’re building products not case studies.

This study is catnip for the people who put “AI” in scare quotes and expect those of us who use it to suddenly realize that we’ve only been generating hallucination slop. This has not been the lived experience of those of us in software development. In my own case I’ve seen teams stop hiring because they are getting the same amount of work done in less time. But those are anecdotes, so it doesn’t count.

In the process of being replaced.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Temporal

JavaScript has had the Date object for handling date and time since its first days. However, the Date API is based on the poorly designed java.util.Date class from Java, which was replaced in the early 2010s; but, because of JavaScript’s goal of backward compatibility, Date sticks around in the language.

The article is a blog post summarizing the actual research. The researchers’ summary says:

We do not provide evidence that: AI systems do not currently speed up many or most software developers. We do not claim that our developers or repositories represent a majority or plurality of software development work.

The research shows that under their tested scenario and assumptions, devs were less productive.

The takeaway from this study is to measure and benchmark what’s important to your team. However many development teams have been doing that, albeit not in a formal study format, and finding AI improves productivity. It is not (only) “vibe productivity”.

And certainly I agree with the person you replied to: anecdotally, AI makes my devs more productive by cutting out the most grindy parts, like writing mocks for tests or getting that last missing coverage corner. So we have some measuring and validation to do.