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Give your developers an AI code assistant for clear, well-defined tasks

Oct 10
2 min read

Updated: 17 hours ago

Public-domain art plate: Audubon — Downy Woodpecker, Birds of America (1827-1838)
Downy Woodpecker is a plate from The Birds of America by John James Audubon (1827-1838).

AI helps most with clear, well-defined programming tasks.

The study. Researchers from Microsoft Research, GitHub and MIT asked 95 developers to write a web server in JavaScript. Half of them could use GitHub Copilot.

The finding. The group with Copilot finished the task 55.8% faster than the control group. Less experienced developers and older developers improved more.

Why it matters. The time of engineers is expensive. This test shows a large increase in speed on a clear task. But real work has more unclear tasks, reviews and bugs (errors in code). Thus, the real increase is smaller.

The takeaway. Give developers an AI code assistant. Measure the effect on your own work, not only on test tasks.

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