Study: using “AI” slows developers down significantly

It's become almost impossible to avoid the AI" evangelists spreading the gospel of how AI" tools are helping them work faster and get more stuff done in less time, but do any of those claims have any basis in reality? Should we really be firing countless people and replace them with AI" tools? Should we spend god knows how much money on AI" tools and force employees to use them?

Well...

When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues-a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%.

Joel Becker, Nate Rush, Beth Barnes, and David Rein

We're very much in the early days of proper research into the actual effectiveness and real-world benefits of AI" tools for all kinds of professions, so a study like this definitely isn't a smoking gun, but it does fly in the face of the tech companies and their evangelists shoving AI" down our collective throat. With how much these tools get even the most basic stuff wrong, with how often they lie and make stuff up, I just can't imagine them speeding up as many tasks as people claim they do.

At the same time, AI" tools do definitely have a place for very specific tasks, and I think that studies like these will look different for every single profession and even every single task within a profession. It's going to be incredibly hard or even impossible to come to a theory of everything" on the effectiveness and usefulness of AI" tools. It won't be until this idiotic hype dies down before we can have a grounded, honest, fact-based discussion about which AI" tools make sense where.