AI Made Coding Faster—So Why Did Software Delivery Get Slower?
AI made the coding stage faster. That does not make the system faster. It raises the arrival rate at whatever stage comes next, and for most teams that stage is human review. Here is where the bottleneck actually went, and what to measure instead of coding speed.
The number that should bother you
The individual-productivity numbers look excellent right up until you put them next to the team numbers.
A 2025 study of experienced open-source developers found they were about 19% slower on familiar codebases when using AI tools, after predicting the tools would make them 24% faster. Even after finishing, they estimated they had been sped up by roughly 20%.
Sit with that gap. Not slower than they thought. Slower in absolute terms, while feeling faster. Junior developers, by contrast, picked up real gains, somewhere in the 10 to 30% range on the kind of well-bounded work they were...
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