The AI industry has made major promises about its tech boosting the productivity of developers, allowing them to generate copious amounts of code with simple text prompts.
But those claims appear to be massively overblown, as The Register reports, with researchers finding that productivity gains are modest at best — and at worst, that AI can actually slow down human developers.
In a new report, management consultants Bain & Company found that despite being “one of the first areas to deploy generative AI,” the “savings have been unremarkable” in programming.
“Generative AI arrived on the scene with sky-high expectations, and many companies rushed into pilot projects,” the report reads. “Yet the results haven’t lived up to the hype.”
First off, “developer adoption is low” even among the companies that rolled out AI tools, the management consultancy found.
Worse yet, while some assistants saw “ten to 15 percent productivity boosts,” the savings most of the time “don’t translate into positive returns.”
It’s yet another warning shot, highlighting concerns that even in one of the most promising areas, the AI industry is struggling to live up to its enormous hype. That’s despite companies pouring untold billions of dollars into its development, with analysts openly fretting about an enormous AI bubble getting closer to popping.
In July, a damning study by nonprofit Model Evaluation & Threat Research found that AI coding tools may not just realize the expected productivity gains, they could slow software developers down.
“Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19 percent longer than without — AI makes them slower,” the researchers wrote. That’s because hallucinations forced the developers to spend extra time cleaning up and reviewing code. The tools also performed worse when dealing with large and complex code repositories, often misunderstanding the context.
Programming website Stack Overflow also found in a survey earlier this year that developers’ trust in AI tools had cratered — despite a rise in the percentage of developers using them. Many of them pointed to solutions that are “almost right, but not quite.”
“One of the most surprising findings was a significant shift in developer preferences for AI compared to previous years, while most developers use AI, they like it less and trust it less this year,” Stack Overflow senior analyst for market research and insights Erin Yepis told VentureBeat in July.
“This response is surprising because with all of the investment in and focus on AI in tech news, I would expect that the trust would grow as the technology gets better,” she added.
It remains to be seen whether the advent of “agentic AIs,” designed to autonomously execute a series of tasks, will change the situation.
“Agentic AI is already reshaping the enterprise, and only those that move decisively —…
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