Experienced devs are slower with AI tools. Nobody wants to admit it.
<p>A recent study discovered that experienced open-source developers were <strong>19% slower</strong> while using AI coding assistants. However, those same developers indicated themselves to believe that they were <strong>20% faster</strong>.</p> <p>Read it
Aditya Agarwal Posted on May 25 Experienced devs are slower with AI tools. Nobody wants to admit it. # webdev # programming # discuss # career A recent study discovered that experienced open-source developers were 19% slower while using AI coding assistants. However, those same developers indicated themselves to believe that they were 20% faster . Read it and weep: the disconnect between perception and reality is nearing 40 percentage points. Why This Should Bother You This wasn't just any survey. It compared real task completion times with self-reported productivity. And the senior engineers - the ones we trust to make all the big architectural decisions - were certainly, but inaccurately, confident about their speed. And the industry is building its entire tooling strategy around the opposite assumption. The Perception Trap I have a hypothesis to explain this phenomenon. As a senior dev, you have a lot of cognitive load taken up by context-switching costs that you are not aware of. You prompt the AI. You read the output. You notice it got the abstraction wrong. You fix it. You re-prompt. You read again. You realize it missed an edge case you would have caught on line three. You fix that too. Every single step appears to be helping. There is less typing on your part. More code on the screen. More dopamine. But wall-clock time, in total? It takes longer to finish the task. → AI output creates an illusion of velocity because characters appear fast → Senior devs spend more time reviewing and correcting than they realize → The cognitive load of evaluating generated code is real work that doesn't feel like work Who Actually Benefits? This is not meant to be anti-AI. It's a more nuanced perspective. AI assistants are genuinely helpful when you are learning a new language or framework. They save you real minutes when you're writing the boilerplate for the hundredth time. They are a decent starting point when you're working with an unfamiliar API. However, if you are famil
📰Originally published at dev.to
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