The ai productivity number just flipped sign. developers forecast ai would cut task time by 24…
the ai productivity number just flipped sign. developers forecast ai would cut task time by 24 percent, then measured it adding 19 percent instead, per metr's october randomized trial.
the forecast is now the warning label.
Context
Verified event date: METR published its randomized controlled trial on Jul 10, 2025. It followed 16 experienced open-source developers working on their own repositories with early-2025 AI tools, and found that with AI they took 19 percent longer.
METR's Feb 24, 2026 update says it is changing its developer productivity experiment design, and that its raw results since show some evidence of speedup.
The 19 percent slower result matches METR's study. It is a July 2025 study of 16 developers, not an October randomized trial, so the post's 'october' date does not match. The 24 percent forecast of time saved is not seen in the excerpts read, so unsupported here, not refuted. METR's 2026 update says newer data shows some evidence of speedup, which the post does not mention.
'the forecast is now the warning label' is the author's opinion.
Related work
Watch next
- Read METR's 2026 update for how newer results differ.
Sources
- METR, Jul 10, 2025metr.org
- METR paper, 2025metr.org
- METR, Feb 24, 2026metr.org
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 11 October 2026 at 07:05 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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