this post was submitted on 27 May 2026
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You’d be surprised…
An AI hype company did a fairly ok study with programmers. Some used ai some didn’t and they compared the difference in completion time.
The AI users were 20% slower than the non AI users, but thought they were faster.
So for your scenario, the company would need to hire 20 extra people to make up for the lost productivity.
Not just 20 extra people. I'm seeing a funny trend in my company where managers decide to get into vibe coding and they get super excited at getting something somewhat functional running, so now they've been presenting "their work" and expecting developers to merge their heaping trash in. That'll require quite a few more people.
This is the real problem thats leading to them thinking they can fire so many people. They get all excited because it can sometimes do something (and possibly do it terribly behind the scenes, but still do it) and oh shit we don't need any humans anymore!
Then you get companies regretting laying people off. The wrong people are making the decisions without understanding what is happening.
It's one study, so I'd take it with a grain of salt, and also the study says
And a comment I read on it says "56% of the participants had never used Cursor before, 1/4th of the participants did better, 3/4 did worse. One of the top performers for AI was also someone with the most previous Cursor use. "
So it really might just be a tooling / experience issue, and the tooling has also improved substantially over the past year, like Claude Code and Chat GPT's Codex. Outputs from LLMs are substantially better in programming than a year ago.
Edit: Looks like they did a followup study with some of the same participants which is always nice to see. I hope they do a 2027 one and they have the same participants again.
https://metr.org/blog/2026-02-24-uplift-update/#wider-adoption-of-ai-has-made-it-more-difficult-to-measure-task-level-productivity
So it's likely people getting used to it, tooling is better, and now they're potentially seeing modest improvements.
They tested it again back in March and got similar results which, being an AI hype company, they buried in their paper.
Many of the programmers refused to not use AI, probably related to the declined cognitive function that some other studies have shown to occur in AI users. I read one testimonial saying that his head would explode if he couldn’t use AI.
So plenty of experience by that point.
I was editing my reply as you replied, but the new study showed they fared better, not worse or the same. Even the new people to the study fared better, but worse than the existing.
They said it did better, every news story for their March test says the opposite.
They are an AI hype company. It’s in their interest to tweak the results and the study to make things look better.
Managers have died for a valid metric about programmer productivity, I haven't heard any breakthroughs about that really, so your "study" is as bs as the CEO "AI is productive" study.