"But beyond that, the blowup about “slowdown from AI” isn’t warranted by the strength of this evidence. The biggest problem I keep coming back to when trying to think about whether to trust this “slowdown” estimate is the fact that “tasks” are so wildly variable in software work, and that the time we spend solving them is wildly variable. This can make simple averages – including group averages – very misleading. We have argued as much in our paper on Cycle Time. In that study, cycle time is roughly analogous to gathering up a bunch of “issues” and looking at the length from start to finish. We observed over a large number of developers (11k+) and observations (55k+), and our paper describes many, many issues with issues – for instance, we acknowledge that we don’t have a huge amount of context about team practices in using tickets or the context that would let us better divide up our “cycle times” into types of work. Nevertheless, we describe some important things that run counter to the industry’s stereotypes. For instance, that even within-developer, a software developer’s own past average “time on task” isn’t a very good predictor of their future times. Software work is highly variable, and that variability does not always reflect an individual difference in the person or the way they’re working."
d00mB0t•6mo ago