If AI makes people so much more productive, why aren't there much more apps on the Apple store? Mobile apps involve a lot of dirty, boring scaffolding work which AI automated first thing, 2 years ago easily. It should've been the very first place where productivity boost should've been evident, a year ago at least. But it's just not there. Why not?

AI can build systems based on static assumptions that the orchestrator (you) gives it. But proper engineering (which is what matters economically much more) is the process of the system's assumptions & requirements changing over time to ensure you have a reliable and consistent service - and that's not something that AI excels at (yet).

Some people prefer evidence before investing large amounts of money and labor. That is not an indication of irrational behavior even if challenging your emotionally invested opinion or result.

There are a few studies that show perceived increases in productivity (all of them show negativ or almost no real increase, but I don't that is relevant to snake oils salesman).

We've had the AI tools for maybe two years, and they have only gotten really good in the past half a year or so. For fuck's sake, adopting electricity took like 50 years, why would you expect to see any kind of effect from the AI so quickly? The tools are still developing - rapidly - and people are still figuring out the best usage patterns for it.

> Why there are no actual studies that show AI is more productive?

Beats me. With "AI" being so good at faking stuff, there should by now be ton of such studies :)

These sort of things are really hard to study. Combine that with the fact that the AI landscape is so varied and fast moving... It's easy to see why there aren't many studies on it.

There are a mountain of things that we reasonably know to be true but haven't done studies on. Is it beneficial for programming languages to support comments? Are regexes error-prone? Does static typing improve productivity on large projects? Is distributed version control better than centralised (lock based)? Etc.

Also you can't just say "AI improves productivity". What kind of AI? What are you using it for? If you're making static landing pages... yeah obviously it's going to help. Writing device drivers in Ada? Not so much.

Dora released a report last year: https://dora.dev/research/2025/dora-report/

The gains are ~17% increase in individual effectiveness, but a ~9% of extra instability.

In my experience using AI assisted coding for a bit longer than 2 years, the benefit is close to what Dora reported (maybe a bit higher around 25%). Nothing close to an average of 2x, 5x, 10x. There's a 10x in some very specific tasks, but also a negative factor in others as seemingly trivial, but high impact bugs get to production that would have normally be caught very early in development on in code reviews.

Obviously depends what one does. Using AI to build a UI to share cat pictures has a different risk appetite than building a payments backend.

I think most major efficiency improvements involve more adaptation costs than expected.

Those that can “see” the potential clearly push through the adaptation period over time, but it can be much longer than anyone expects.

Depending on how forward looking a group is, that is a problem, or pure win.

But external measurements won’t be able to distinguish between what may be very fast accumulating forward looking returns/value vs. little or negative benefit, for some time.

I also wonder what the demise of non-adaptive firms does to these numbers. When underlying value lags, despite top line returns, and then disappears due to failure, is that serious previously masked lack of “efficiency” ever accounted for?

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This is the dual of measuring running productivity/effort without taking into account long term accumulation of tech debt.

If/when technical debt becomes an obvious drag in performance, it suddenly goes from invisible to overriding significance.

So... you want a study to prove your ready made hypothesis?

It might also depend on how the tools are used. In practice a lot of value seems to come from reducing small bits of friction rather than dramatically increasing output.

because you can just look at the commit log

Just trust the vibe, bro. One trillion market cap cannot be wrong.