“Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity” by habryka

Author: LessWrong ([email protected])
Published: Fri 11 Jul 2025
Episode Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9eizzh3gtcRvWipq8/measuring-the-impact-of-early-2025-ai-on-experienced-open

METR released a new paper with very interesting results on developer productivity effects from AI. I have copied their blog post here in full.

We conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to understand how early-2025 AI tools affect the productivity of experienced open-source developers working on their own repositories. Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19% longer than without—AI makes them slower. We view this result as a snapshot of early-2025 AI capabilities in one relevant setting; as these systems continue to rapidly evolve, we plan on continuing to use this methodology to help estimate AI acceleration from AI R&D automation [1].

See the full paper for more detail.

Motivation

While coding/agentic benchmarks [2] have proven useful for understanding AI capabilities, they typically sacrifice realism for scale and efficiency—the tasks are self-contained, don’t require prior context to understand, and use algorithmic evaluation [...]

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Outline:

(01:23) Motivation

(02:39) Methodology

(03:56) Core Result

(05:15) Factor Analysis

(06:12) Discussion

(11:08) Going Forward

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First published:

July 11th, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9eizzh3gtcRvWipq8/measuring-the-impact-of-early-2025-ai-on-experienced-open

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