Yet another study showing that AI-assisted coding isn’t resulting in any meaningful productivity benefits.
Faros AI just analysed data from 10,000+ developers across 1,255 teams. Their July 2025 report: The AI Productivity Paradox confirms what DX, DORA and others have already shown: GenAI coding assistants may make individual developers faster, but organisations are not seeing meaningful productivity gains.
Some of the findings:
- Developers using AI complete 21% more tasks and merge 98% more PRs
- But review times are up 91%, PRs are 154% bigger, and bugs per dev up 9%
- Delivery metrics (lead time, change failure rate) are flat
- At the company level: no measurable impact
Why? Because coding isn’t the bottleneck.
The report itself says it: “Downstream bottlenecks cancel out gains”. Review, testing, and deployment can’t keep pace, so the system jams.
Exactly the point I made in my recent post – only a small amount of overall time is spent writing the code, the majority is queues and inspection. Speeding up coding just piles more into those already bloated stages.
It isn’t really a paradox. It’s exactly what queuing theory and systems thinking predict: speeding up one part of the system without fixing the real constraint just makes the bottleneck worse.