Writing code versus shipping code: Productivity effects of AI coding tools (opens in new tab)

Generative AI now writes a substantial share of the world's code, but aggregate software output has changed far less. This column uses data on more than 100,000 GitHub developers, combined with data on their AI tool usage, to trace the productivity effects of three successive generations of AI coding tools. Each generation raises coding activity more than the last, but the gains shrink sharply as work moves from writing code to shipping software. Human bottlenecks in reviewing, integrating, t...