Productivity Perception

A study published in mid-2025 assessed the perceived gains in productivity enjoyed by open-source developers using AI tools, compared to their actual productivity gains while using those tools.

So these coders (primarily) used a popular AI coding tool called Cursor Pro and popular AI systems (Claude 3.5 and 3.7 Sonnet) to help them with their work in early-2025, and their activity was tracked, but they were also asked to estimate how much more productive they were during that tracked period.

What the researchers found is that although these tracked developers estimated (ahead of time) that using these AI tools would help reduce the completion time of their tasks by an average of about 24%, and then estimated afterward that the tools helped them finish their projects about 20% faster than they would have, sans such tools, tracking data showed that it actually increased their completion time by 19%.

This suggests that though these tools made these developers feel more efficient and productive, the tools actually slowed them down.