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 — redesigning their architecture, teams, and ways of working — will unlock its full value,” the report reads.
Besides slowing coders down, experts have warned that AI coding assistants could introduce major security problems as well. In a recent report, security firm Apiiro found that developers who use AI produce ten times more security problems than their counterparts who don’t use the tech.
Then there’s the issue of finding an agreed-upon way of tracking productivity gains, a glaring omission given the billions of dollars being invested in AI.
To Bain & Company, companies will need to fully commit themselves to realize the gains they’ve been promised.
“Real value comes from applying generative AI across the entire software development life cycle, not just coding,” the report reads. “Nearly every phase can benefit, from the earlier discovery and requirements stages, through planning and design, to testing, deployment, and maintenance.”
“Broad adoption, however, requires process changes,” the consultancy added. “If AI speeds up coding, then code review, integration, and release must speed up as well to avoid bottlenecks.”
More on AI coding: Programmers Using AI Create Way More Glaring Security Issues, Data Shows
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