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Study Says AI Coding Tools Make You 19% Slower — And Nobody Saw It Coming
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chat-to.devStudy Says AI Coding Tools Make You 19% Slower — And Nobody Saw It ComingA controlled study by [METR](https://secondthoughts.ai/p/ai-coding-slowdown) took experienced open source developers, people who already knew their repositories inside out, and measured how long they took to resolve real GitHub issues with and without an AI assistant. The result was the opposite of what everyone expected: they were about 19% slower when using AI. The most interesting detail isn't even that number, it's that before starting each task the developers themselves predicted they'd be faster with the tool. Expectation and reality collided head on, and that alone says a lot about how we tend to judge these tools day to day.
It's worth separating two phases we usually lump together as one thing. Writing code and debugging code are different cognitive tasks, and AI helps far more with the first than with the second. Typing out boilerplate, generating a simple function, scaffolding a component, AI handles that fast and well. The problem shows up later, when something breaks. A [