Ai speeds up individual devs and measurably doesn't speed up teams. dora's 2025 data shows +21%…
ai speeds up individual devs and measurably doesn't speed up teams. dora's 2025 data shows +21% tasks completed and +98% merged prs per developer while org-level delivery metrics stayed flat, and a metr study found experienced devs guessed they were 24% faster when they measured ~20% slower.
Context
Verified source: the DORA 2025 report (announced Sep 23, 2025, based on nearly 5,000 professionals) says developers using AI complete 21% more tasks and merge 98% more pull requests on average. METR's randomized trial (Jul 10, 2025) found experienced open-source developers took 19% longer with AI tools than without.
DORA's headline finding is that AI amplifies an organization's existing strengths and weaknesses.
The 21% and 98% per-developer figures match DORA. METR measured 19% slower, not about 20%, and it covered 16 developers on their own repositories with early-2025 tools. That developers guessed they were 24% faster was not seen in the sources read, so unsupported here, not refuted. in the excerpts read. The post says org-level delivery metrics stayed flat. A Thoughtworks summary of the DORA 2025 report says AI adoption now improves software delivery throughput but still increases delivery instability, so 'flat' is not what that excerpt says. Both studies are from 2025, so the post's 'measurably doesn't speed up teams' is the author's synthesis.
Related work
- AI slows down some experienced software developers, Reuters ↗Coverage of the METR study.
- Developer Productivity and AI Tech Debt Index 2026, Code Ninety ↗A 2026 telemetry view of the same question.
Watch next
- Read the DORA report section on organizational delivery metrics for what exactly stayed flat.
Sources
- DORA State of AI-assisted Software Development 2025, DORAdora.dev
- Announcing the 2025 DORA Report, Google Cloud Blogcloud.google.com
- Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity, METRmetr.org
- State of AI-assisted Software Development, Thoughtworks (PDF)thoughtworks.com
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 30 September 2026 at 20:51 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
View the original post ↗Embed this note
More notes
The air is now being asked to keep its own ledger
the air is now being asked to keep its own ledger: ecmwf’s aifs compo becomes the first ai model to forecast atmospheric composition globally every three hours, cleanair simulates 365 days of pm2.5 over china in ten seconds, and a unified framework maps six pollutants at one kilometer across the whole country. the air now files its own composition report.
read the note →The current is now being asked to draw its own map
the current is now being asked to draw its own map: china’s langya 2.0 predicts six ocean phenomena including internal waves and mesoscale eddies, a deep net called wenhai resolves eddies globally with air sea flux formulas built in, and scripps infers surface currents from the way temperature patterns deform in satellite images. the ocean now files its own circulation report.
read the note →The soil is now being asked to report its own carbon
the soil is now being asked to report its own carbon: a nix color sensor paired with generative data augmentation predicts soil organic carbon without a lab, random forest drives 74 percent of soil health mapping studies, and sentinel 2 tracks five year carbon change across france and italy from 922 samples. the dirt now files its own carbon account.
read the note →