Are We Letting AI Code for Us — and Killing Our Skills?
The Trade-off Between Mastery and Speed.
With so many overblown headlines, it's challenging to get a clear grasp of the productivity improvements that AI coding tools like ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, and Cursor truly bring.
At our studio, we've found these AI coding tools offer noticeable productivity gains. While some claim a 10x increase, our experience aligns more with a modest yet significant improvement. In fact, a recent Google study estimates an average 21% improvement in developer productivity for AI users.
We're not in the strongly anti-AI camp. On the contrary, we believe it has made our engineers — most of whom are senior — more productive. Yet, at the same time, we've grown concerned about the long-term effects of over-dependence on AI tools. In the long run, will it make us worse at writing software? Does it deprive us of practice, causing us to learn more slowly?