The biggest ai productivity number is activity, not output. an mit sloan study found autocomplete…
the biggest ai productivity number is activity, not output. an mit sloan study found autocomplete tools raised coding activity 40%, sync agents pushed it to 140%, and async agents to 180% — while the same research shows those gains barely moved final shipped work.
devs got busier, not faster.
Context
Verified source: MIT Sloan (Sep 2, 2026) covers a paper by Demirer, Musolff and Yang, Writing Code vs. Shipping Code. It studies more than 500,000 GitHub developers with AI usage telemetry across successive generations of tools, and concludes that gains are large when developers write code but muted in final output. The paper is also NBER Working Paper 35275.
The excerpts read did not include the percentage figures for each tool generation.
The finding that coding gains barely carry over to final shipped work matches MIT Sloan and the paper's abstract. The specific 40% for autocomplete, 140% for sync agents and 180% for async agents were not seen in the sources read, so unsupported here, not refuted. 'Devs got busier, not faster' is the author's opinion; the paper's wording is that the effect is muted for final output.
Related work
- SSRN listing ↗Same paper, preprint host.
- NBER ↗Working paper page.
- MIT Sloan ↗Sep 2, 2026.
Watch next
- Open the paper's results section for the activity gains by tool generation.
Sources
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 1 October 2026 at 06:08 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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