2025 DORA Report

This seems to be a poll of _users_. "Do people think it has improved _their_ productivity?" is a very different question to "Has it empirically improved aggregate productivity of a team/company/industry." People think _all_ sorts of snake oil improve their productivity; you can't trust people to self-report on things like this.

There's a few explanations for this, and it's not necessarily contradictory.

1. AI doesn't improve productivity and people just have cognitive biases. (logical, but I also don't think it's true from what I know...)

2. AI does improve productivity, but only if you find your own workflow and what tasks it's good for, and many companies try to shoehorn it into things which just don't work for it.

3. AI does improve productivity, but people aren't incentivised to improve their productivity because they don't see returns from it. Hence, they just use it to work less and have the same output.

4. The previous one but instead of working less, they work at a more leisurely pace.

5. AI doesn't improve producivity, people just feel it's more productive because it requires less cognitive effort to use than actually doing the task.

Any of these is plausible, yet they have massively different underlying explanations.... studies don't really show why that's the case. I personally think it's mostly 2. and 3., but it could really be any of these.

It's not even claiming that. It's only claiming that people who responded to the survey feel more productive. (Unless you assume that people taking this survey have an objective measure for their own productivity.)

> Significant productivity gains: Over 80% of respondents indicate that AI has enhanced their productivity.

_Feeling_ more productive is inline with the one proper study I've seen.

Well when I use a power screwdriver I am always impressed by how much more quickly I can finish easy tasks too. I also occasionally busted a screw or three, that then I had to drill out...

Straight code writing has never been the problem - it's the understanding of said code that is. When you rely on AI, and AI creates something, it might increase productivity immediately but once you need to debug something that uses that piece of code, it will nullify that gain as you have no idea where to look. That's just one aspect of this false equivalency.

I also find it great for prompts like:

"this function should do X, spot inconsistencies, potential issues and bugs"

It's eye opening sometimes.

So long as you view AI as a sometimes competent liar, then it can be useful.

I've found AI is pretty good at dumb boilerplate stuff. I was able to whip out prototypes, client interfaces, tests, etc pretty fast with AI.

However, when I've asked AI "Identify performance problems or bugs in this code" I find it'll just make up nonsense. Particularly if there aren't problems with the code.

And it makes sense that this is the case. AI has been trained on a mountain of boilerplate and a thimble of performance and bug optimizations.

Or you aren’t as good as you think you are :-)

Almost every person I worked with that is impressed by AI generated code has been a low performer that can’t spot the simplest bugs in the code. Usually the same developers that blindly copy pasted from stack overflow before.

In a report from Google, who is heavily invested in AI becoming the future, I actually expect the respondents to sound more positive about AI than they actually are

Much like in person I pretend to think AI is much more powerful and inevitable than I actually think it is. Professionally it makes very little sense to be truthful. Sincerity won't pay the bills.

I was confused, since DORA is also the EU Digital Operational Resilience Act.