By Sasha Rogelberg
Publication Date: 2026-01-05 15:44:00
It’s like a new tale of “The Tortoise and the Hare”: a group of experienced software engineers started an experiment in which they were tasked with doing part of their work using AI tools. Developers thought like they were quick and expected AI to speed up their work and increase productivity. Instead, they were thwarted by technology. The AI-free turtle approach would have been faster in the context of the experiment.
The results of this experiment, part of a recent study, were a surprise to the software developers tasked with using AI — and to the study’s authors, Joel Becker and Nate Rush, technical staff at the nonprofit technology research organization Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR).
The researchers assigned 16 software developers with an average of five years of experience to complete 246 tasks, each of which was part of projects they were already working on. For half of the tasks the developers were allowed…
