alt Hacker NewsThe AI skeptics instead stick to hard data, which so far shows a 19% reduction in productivity when using AI.
Replies
raincole • yesterday at 11:04 PM
There is no such hard data. It's just research done on 16 developers using Cursor and Sonnet 3.5.
The AI skeptics instead stick to hard data, which so far shows a 19% reduction in productivity when using AI.
There is no such hard data. It's just research done on 16 developers using Cursor and Sonnet 3.5.
https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
> 1) We do NOT provide evidence that AI systems do not currently speed up many or most software developers. Clarification: We do not claim that our developers or repositories represent a majority or plurality of software development work.
> 2) We do NOT provide evidence that AI systems do not speed up individuals or groups in domains other than software development. Clarification: We only study software development.
> 3) We do NOT provide evidence that AI systems in the near future will not speed up developers in our exact setting. Clarification: Progress is difficult to predict, and there has been substantial AI progress over the past five years [3].
> 4) We do NOT provide evidence that there are not ways of using existing AI systems more effectively to achieve positive speedup in our exact setting. Clarification: Cursor does not sample many tokens from LLMs, it may not use optimal prompting/scaffolding, and domain/repository-specific training/finetuning/few-shot learning could yield positive speedup.