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AI coders think they’re 20% faster — but they’re actually 19% slower
(pivot-to-ai.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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Programming
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I read the article (not the study only the abstract) and they were getting paid an hourly rate. It did not mention anything about whether or not they had expirence in using llms to code. I feel there is a sweet spot, has to do with context window size etc.
I was not consistently better a year and a half ago but now i know the limits caveats and methods.
I think this is a very difficult thing to quantify but haters gonna latch on to this, same as the study that said “ai makes you stupid” and “llms cant reason”… its a cool tool that has limits.
One interesting feature in this paper is that the programmers who used LLMs thought they were faster, they estimated it was saving about 20% of the time it would have taken without LLMs. I think that's a clear sign that you shouldn't trust your gut about how much time LLMs save you, you should definitely try to measure it.
The study did find a correlation between prior experience and performance. One of the developers who showed a positive speedup with AI was the one with the most previous experience using Cursor (over 50 hours).