AI is making software developers faster — just not at actually shipping software

A study of more than 100,000 developers finds a vast gap between writing code and shipping software. The reason is human bottlenecks

Companies have spent the last two years paying for AI coding tools on the premise that more code, written faster, means more software delivered. A new study of more than 100,000 developers suggests that premise is wrong.

The latest AI coding tools produced 741% more lines of code. Actual software releases rose 20%. That gap — between what the tools generate and what teams actually ship — is the central finding, and it has direct implications for anyone making decisions about AI investment.

The study, from researchers at MIT and Wharton, is the first to trace the effect of AI coding tools from raw code all the way through to shipped software and real-world usage at scale. Earlier research measured how fast developers completed individual tasks. This one asks whether any of that speed shows up in the final product.

What the study actually measured

The May 2026 working paper combined public GitHub data with internal Microsoft $MSFT records. Researchers tracked developer........

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