State of AI-assisted software development
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Every study I've read says nobody is seeing productivity gains from AI use. Here's an AI vendor saying the opposite. Funny.
2026, year of cybersecurity. Baby, let's goo :D
> AI adoption among software development professionals has surged to 90%I am proudly part of the 10%!
DORA stands for "DevOps Research and Assessment" in case anyone was curious.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DevOps_Research_and_Assessment
so the whole thing is about AI?
What the heck is that "DORA AI Capabilities Model" diagram trying to show.
I'm curious what their sample set for this survey was, because "90% of software developers use AI, at a median of 2 hours a day" is more than I'd have expected.(But maybe I'm out of touch!)
Rant mode on.For the second time of the week this morning, I spent 45 min reviewing a merge request where the guy has no idea what he did, didn’t test, and let the llm hallucinate a very bad solution to a simple problem.He just had to read the previous commit, which introduced the bug, and think about it for 1min.We are creating young people that have a very limited attention span, have no incentive to think about things, and have very pleasing metrics on the dora scale. When asked what their code is doing, they just don’t know. They can’t event explain the choices they made.Honestly I think AI is just a very very sharp knife. We’re going to regret this just like regretting the mass offshoring in the 2000s.
Its puzzling to me that people are still debating productivity after its been good enough to quantify for a while now.My (merged) PR rate is up about 3x since i started using claude code over the course of a few months. I correspondingly feel more productive and that i have a good grasp of what it can and cannot do. I definitely see some people use it wrong. I also see it fail on some tasks id expect it to succeed at, such as abstracting a singleton in an ios app i am tinkering with, that suggests its not merely operator error but also that its skill is uneven dep on task, ecosystem, and language.I am curious for those that use it regularly, have you measured your actual commit rates? Thats ofc still not the same as measuring long term valuable output, but were still a ways off from being able to determime that imho.
No need for evidence of net benefits to get mass adoption. We have mass adoption of digital touchpads in cars despite evidence they are not safe. We have widespread adoption of open spaces despite evidence of them not increasing productivity..
>> Our research this year also found that AI can act as a "mirror and a multiplier.” In cohesive organizations, AI boosts efficiency. In fragmented ones, it highlights weaknesses.This is interesting -- It's helping in some cases and possibly worsening in some others. Does anyone have the details? (I haven't looked into the report as yet.) Thanks.
> This indicates that AI outputs are perceived as useful and valuable by many of this year’s survey respondents, despite a lack of complete trust in them.Or the respondents have hard times admitting AI can replace them :-)I'm a bit cynical but sometimes when I use Claude, it is downright frightening how good it is sometimes. Having coded for a lot of year, I'm sometimes a bit scared that my craft can, somtimes, be so easily replaced... Sure it's not building all my code, it fails etc. but it's a bit disturbing to see that somethign you have been trained a for a very long time can be done by a machine... Maybe I'm just feeling a glimpse of what others felt during the industrial revolution :-)