Chapter 1
The Inversion
In mid-2025, a research organization called METR conducted one of the only controlled experiments on whether AI coding tools make experienced software developers faster. They recruited sixteen seasoned open-source contributors, people who averaged five years and fifteen hundred commits on their respective projects, codebases with twenty-two thousand stars and over a million lines of code. The researchers randomly assigned 246 real tasks, bug fixes, features, and refactors, to be completed with or without AI assistance, and asked each developer to predict, before starting, how much the tools would help. The developers predicted a twenty-four percent speedup. After completing the tasks, they reported feeling about twenty ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access