This is a cross post of an article I wrote for Ada, the National College for Digital Skills All the available evidence suggests that GenAI-assisted coding is most powerful in the hands of highly experienced software engineers, while having neutral or even negative effects for less experienced ones. It’s easy to see how this may […]
I’ve been trying to work out why successive advances in GenAI models don’t feel particularly different to me, even as others react with genuine excitement. I use these tools constantly and have done since ChatGPT4 was released nearly 3 years ago. I couldn’t imagine a world without them. In that sense, they already feel as […]
In early 2025 I wrote about GitClear’s analysis of the impact of GenAI on code quality, based on 2024 data, which showed a significant degradation in code quality and maintainability. I recently came across a new study from Carnegie Mellon, “Does AI-Assisted Coding Deliver? A Difference-in-Differences Study of Cursor’s Impact on Software Projects” that looks […]
The DX AI-assisted engineering: Q4 (2025) impact report offers one of the most substantial empirical views yet of how AI coding assistants are affecting software development, and largely corroborates the key findings from the 2025 DORA State of AI-assisted Software Development Report: quality outcomes vary dramatically based on existing engineering practices, and both the biggest […]
Unsurprisingly, there are a lot of strong opinions on AI assisted coding. Some engineers swear by it. Others say it’s dangerous. And of course, as is the way with the internet, nuanced positions get flattened into simplistic camps where everyone’s either on one side or the other. A lot of the problem is that people […]
Some argue that even if the current AI boom leads to an overbuild, it might not be a bad thing – just as the dotcom bubble left behind the internet infrastructure that powered later decades of growth. It’s a tempting comparison, but the parallels only go so far. The dotcom era’s overbuild created durable, open […]
This is one of the most important pieces of writing I’ve read on AI – and that’s not the kind of thing I say lightly. If you’re leading in a business right now and looking at AI adoption, it’s worth your full attention. Duncan Brown’s Team dynamics after AI isn’t about model performance or the […]
The idea of LLMs as a new abstraction layer for software development keeps coming up. On the surface it sounds appealing. Just as compilers turn source into binaries, AI could turn prompts into systems. You store the prompts, they become the source of truth, AI generates the code and the code just becomes an artefact. […]
The recent DORA 2025 State of AI-Assisted Software Development report suggests that, today, only a small minority of the industry are likely to benefit from AI-assisted coding – and more importantly, avoid doing themselves harm. The report groups teams into seven clusters to show how AI-assisted coding is shaping delivery. Only two – 6 (“Pragmatic […]
I don’t think people fully appreciate yet how agentic AI use cases are restricted by what Simon Willison coined the “lethal trifecta”. His article is a bit technical so I’ll try and break it down in more layman’s terms. An AI agent becomes very high risk when these three things come together: Each of those […]