Coders are refusing to work without AI — and that could come back to bite them
In 2026, you cannot snatch AI coding tools out of developers’ vice-grip hands, researchers have discovered.
But while AI is undoubtedly helping coders produce code faster, it may not be producing better code, other researchers warn. And that could cause problems down the road for them.
Specifically, in February 2026, respected AI research lab METR published a surprising revelation: most developers won’t work, even on a limited number of tasks, without AI anymore.
METR had hoped to provide an update to some groundbreaking research published a few months earlier, in 2025, on AI coding productivity. In it, researchers measured how much time open source developers took to do tasks by hand versus with AI.
While developers in that study reported that AI was making them more productive, they were shocked to learn it actually slowed them down. Sure, it generated code faster, but then they spent extra time finding and...
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