Despite widespread adoption, the impact of AI tools on software development in the wild remains understudied. We conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to understand how AI tools at the February-June 2025 frontier affect the productivity of experienced open-source developers. 16 developers with moderate AI experience complete 246 tasks in mature projects on which they have an average of 5 years of prior experience. Each task is randomly assigned to allow or disallow usage of early 2025 AI tools. When AI tools are allowed, developers primarily use Cursor Pro, a popular code editor, and Claude 3.5/3.7 Sonnet. Before starting tasks, developers forecast that allowing AI will reduce completion time by 24%. After completing the study, developers estimate that allowing AI reduced completion time by 20%. Surprisingly, we find that allowing AI actually increases completion time by 19%--AI tooling slowed developers down. This slowdown also contradicts predictions from experts in economics (39% shorter) and ML (38% shorter). To understand this result, we collect and evaluate evidence for 20 properties of our setting that a priori could contribute to the observed slowdown effect--for example, the size and quality standards of projects, or prior developer experience with AI tooling. Although the influence of experimental artifacts cannot be entirely ruled out, the robustness of the slowdown effect across our analyses suggests it is unlikely to primarily be a function of our experimental design.

Daniel Rausch, Amazon's vice president of Alexa and Echo, is in the midst of a major transition. More than a decade beyond the launch of Amazon's Alexa, he's been tasked with creating a new version of the marquee voice assistant, one that's powered by large language models. As he put it in my interview with him, this new assistant, dubbed Alexa, is "a complete rebuild of the architecture." How did his team approach Amazon's largest ever revamp of its voice assistant? They used AI to build AI, of course.

What worries me about AI tooling ai philosophy akselmo.dev

I was listening Linux Downtime episode 51 and meanwhile it was nice to hear that Copilot has been helpful for open source developers.. Like I guess I'm glad my awful code could benefit some system that helps to solve problems. But also I am not glad that some big billion software house took it and sold it. It's unethical to me, but corporations have never cared about ethics. So I am yelling at a wall basically. The actual worry is that suddenly everything has their own AI assisted service and that you're soon to be expected to use them to live "normally."

Michael Bower helps companies provide cool experiences to their customers on the web. As CEO of Sellry, an ecommerce solutions company, he combines creativity with the latest technology to propel brands into the future. Alongside clients, Sellry works to reimagine and design the future of ecommerce. What new technology do you think will greatly impact consumer-facing startups in the near future? AR is going to completely change many industries.