AI Wrote 741% More Code and Shipped Just 30% More, Says a 100,000-Developer Study

Economists matched more than 100,000 GitHub developers with their real AI usage and tracked the work from keyboard to shipped product. Conversational assistants cranked out 741% more lines of code, yet finished releases rose only about 20% to 30%, because review, approval, and human judgment never sped up. The same paper checked four app marketplaces and found a flood of new apps with no rise in anyone actually using them, just a growing pile of software nobody downloads. The garbage fountain runs at full pressure, and the productivity revolution evaporates at the one step where a human still has to care. Quartz on the GitHub coding study