For two years I argued the feeling of AI speed had come apart from the fact of it, from watching my own teams. This summer it stopped being an anecdote. A controlled trial measured experienced developers feeling about 20% faster while running about 19% slower. The instrument we steer by reads backward.
2025 is such old news that this just isn’t relevant.
METR already redid the study at a later date and now finds a likely 18% speedup
“For the subset of the original developers who participated in the later study, we now estimate a speedup of -18% with a confidence interval between -38% and +9%” (note their use of - and + here could be slightly confusing but they do mean 18% faster per the post)
But the link you shared explains that few of the participants filtered the tasks and chose which to do and which to avoid, based on AI availability, so, as per their review, the data is probably not entirely useful.
top comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48757440
2025 is such old news that this just isn’t relevant.
METR already redid the study at a later date and now finds a likely 18% speedup
“For the subset of the original developers who participated in the later study, we now estimate a speedup of -18% with a confidence interval between -38% and +9%” (note their use of - and + here could be slightly confusing but they do mean 18% faster per the post)
https://metr.org/blog/2026-02-24-uplift-update/
must be heart breaking for Lemmy 😭
But the link you shared explains that few of the participants filtered the tasks and chose which to do and which to avoid, based on AI availability, so, as per their review, the data is probably not entirely useful.