AI slows us down

LLMs take over programming. So that’s it ? Years of experience, degrees and certificates are now worthless ? According to non-programmers that is in fact the case.

Experienced developers know the shortcomings though. The more experienced they are, the less stressed they are about it. As outlined in my last Post even the GitHub CEO states that programmers are not going anywhere.

But why is every company pushing AI so much ? Does it make us more efficient ?

Perception vs reality

According to a new study, “Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity”, where they analyzed the time it took experienced developers to complete a task using AI and without, it actually takes experienced developers longer to complete the issues with AI tools.

That is surprising, at least the amount. According to the study it took them on overage 19% longer to complete an issue with AI support.

The fact that strikes me most is:

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%

It’s already hard to judge the impact of AI by looking at the opinions of non-programmers, salesmen and similiar.

But the fact that we, as programmers, can’t even rely on our judgement, is worrying.

Think twice for which tasks AI / LLMs are actually useful.

Currently they are not at level we expect them to be.