The bitter pill
As AI adoption continues apace, one good thing coming out of this second mass experiment of the decade (the first being Work From Home, caused by Covid) is data . As more and more companies adopt AI in the software development workflow, they are generating huge amounts of information about its effectiveness. The folks at CircleCI are in a unique position to collect the data across millions (28 million to be precise) of delivery pipelines they host. They have published a summary of their findings here . So what do 28 million data points tell us about using AI in software delivery? It's..."interesting". TL;DR - AI's effect on branches is noticeable. It increases throughput of branches for median teams significantly (15%), but this increase never makes it to production; they are never released. The production release branch throughput degrades by ~7% for the average team - AI adoption slows down teams by quite a lot. As expected, the AI-induced pressure of generating m...