Does AI make developers more productive?

You’ve seen the studies claiming that AI boosts developer productivity too, right?

If you look closely at who conducts those studies, you’ll find that they are usually companies selling their own AI products.

Uplevel, a vendor of engineering analytics, conducted its own observational analysis of how GitHub Copilot affected development metrics.

They analyzed three months of engineering data from nearly 800 developers, comparing metrics with and without Copilot access.

So what did they find?

1. 01

   No significant change in cycle time or pull-request throughput;

2. 02

   Developers with Copilot access introduced 41% more bugs, suggesting a potential drop in code quality;

3. 03

   Copilot access did not improve Uplevel’s burnout-risk indicator.

This is one vendor’s observational analysis, not a definitive verdict on AI coding tools. It does, however, challenge the idea that access to such a tool automatically makes every team faster or more effective.

It still seems too early to say that AI can meet every need, but it is definitely changing how we approach our work.

Which AI assistants do you use, and for what?