AI coding assistants make experienced developers feel faster but measurably slower on large codebases

Summary

The article argues that AI coding assistants (like GitHub Copilot) make experienced developers feel faster while actually slowing them down on large, complex codebases. The author presents evidence from a controlled trial where developers reported feeling about 20% faster but were measured running about 19% slower. The core thesis is that AI speeds up typing — which was never the bottleneck for experts in codebases they already know — while adding overhead from prompting, waiting, and reviewing subtly wrong output at the most expensive stage of development.

Source

Hacker NewsAI coding assistants make experienced developers feel faster but measurably slower on large codebasesintrepidkarthi.com