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AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

Metr recently published a paper about the impact AI tools have on open-source developer productivity1. They show that when open source developers working in codebases that they are deeply familiar with use AI tools to complete a task, then they take longer to complete that task compared to other tasks where they are barred from using AI tools.

The developers could provide chunks of that mental model to their AI tools - but doing so is a slow and lossy process that will never truly capture the theory of the program that exists in their minds. When you are limited to transferring a mental model through text, to an entity that will never challenge or ask clarifying questions, which can't really learn, and which cannot treat one statement as more important than any other - well the task becomes essentially impossible. In the previous paragraph I wrote that AI tools will slow down someone who "knows what they are doing, and who is working on a project they understand" - does this describe the average software developer in industry?

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