Link: https://thelastsoftwareengineer.substack.com/p/the-future-of-ai-software-is-already

In this paper from Harvard, researchers look at a large dataset of approximately 300 million work events of 700,000 workers across 700 firms. They find that the adoption of AI agents leads to large and significant increases in lines of code (30%), commits (20%), and PRs (23%). These numbers are consistent with what I hear from talking to people in the industry, as well as in other literature. However, when they look at features deployed to production, they only find small (statistically insignificant) positive effects. How is it the case that so much more code is being written, but the amount of features we see varies so widely in different types of software?