Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity
In a study of experienced open-source developers, access to AI tools like Cursor Pro and Claude actually *increased* the time it took to complete tasks by 19%. Surprisingly, both expert forecasters and the developers themselves predicted significant *speedups* from using AI, even after the developers had used the tools. This highlights a disconnect between perceived and actual AI impact on productivity.