I have yet to see AI write acceptable code and I've said it before and I'll say it again, AI slows down a skilled developer. MIT even did a study on it showing that developers get slowed down between ~19% - ~22%.
First, that study wasn't out of MIT. It was an independent group.
Second, you're oversimplifying what they found.
That study showed senior developers were slower on brownfield type tasks. When there is deep architecture, a particular project set of jargon/idioms, and large-scale dependencies, senior developers were slower with AI tools (that existed at the time of that study). However, if you are starting from scratch or doing more simple tasks, that same study found evidence that AI can increase productivity.
It's also important to understand the limitations of that study and what can be inferred from their data. From
that paper: "The slowdown we observe does not imply that current AI tools do not often improve developer’s productivity—we find evidence that the high developer familiarity with repositories and the size and maturity of the repositories both contribute to the observed slowdown, and these factors do not apply in many software development settings. For example, our results are consistent with small greenfield projects or development in unfamiliar codebases seeing substantial speedup from AI assistance."
So experienced developers using mature repositories they are highly familiar with were faster than AI-assisted developers on particular tasks. For many other situations, there is solid evidence of speedup in other studies and in that one. Focusing just on the slowdown misses the bigger picture. Granted, the authors of the paper highlighted the slowdown more than the speedups, but they were pushing back against a broader set of data or perception that using AI tools
always speeds up productivity. That is not the case.
But this study does not show developers are always slower with AI tools, just sometimes slower. Overall, the data suggest AI can slow down some developers in some areas and speed up in other areas.
I'll give an anecdote as someone who is not a developer. I've been writing Bash (yes, not a "real" language) code for a couple decades. I have some experience with Python and R. It's been many years since I've done anything with BASIC, C, C++, or Java.
What do I do? I'm a scientist who uses a lot of coding for my research. I now have Gemini and ChatGPT generate Python, R, and Bash code all the time for my work. It does exactly what I need in about 1/10th the time it used to take me to do things. That's not an exaggeration. If anything, it's an under-estimate.
Just a quick example. Getting data ready for my dissertation analyses involved me writing a 3000+ line script. That took some months to work through and verify everything. If that was the only thing I needed to work on, maybe I could have done it in 1-2 weeks. I can generate just as complex code that does similar things and much more (and with me verifying output!)
within a day or two now.
It was a good learning experience for me at the time, but it also meant that instead of having time to work on other research that would lead to publications, I used all my time on my dissertation. Again, that was fine, but I appreciate being able to get through much more coding in much less time than I used to. I have more time to think about the science.
But I'm not a developer and my anecdote only applies to my situation.
