"Experienced developers were 19% slower when using AI coding assistants—yet believed they were faster (METR, 2025)"

Anecdotally I see this _all the time_...

Talking and typing feels far more productive that staring and thinking, and there is a cumulative effect of those breaks to check Reddit while something is generating.

Humans are notoriously bad at estimating time use with different subjective experiences and show excessive weighting of the tail ends of experiences and perceived repetitious tasks. Making something psychologically more comforting and active, particularly if you can activate speech, will distort people’s sense of time meaningfully.

The current hype around LLMs is making me think about misapplied ORMs in medium scale projects... The tool is chosen early to save hours of boring typing and a certain kind of boring maintenance, but deep into the project what do we see? Over and over days are spontaneously being lost to incidental complexity and arbitrary tool constraints. And with the schedule slipping it’s too much work to address the root issue so band-aides get put on band-aides, and we start seeing weeks slip down the drain.

Subjective time accounting and excessive aversion to specific conceptual tasks creates premature optimizations whose effects become omnipresent over time. All the devs in the room agreed they want to avoid some work day 1, but the accounting shows a big time commitment resulting from that immediate desire. Feelings aren’t stopwatches.

[Not hating on ORMs, just misusing tools for weeks to save a couple hours - every day ain’t Saturday - right tool for the job.]

This is actually amazing, isn't it? we are just 21% away from becoming faster then?

Also I don't even care about speed, since I've managed to get soooo much work done which I would not even have wanted to start working on manually.

Yes, that's true, because as developer you have to check if "generated" code meet your standards and if is handling all edge cases you see.

When you are an experienced developer and you "struggle" writing manually some code this is important warning indicator about project architecture - that something is wrong in it.

For such cases I like to step back and think about redesign/refactor. When coding goes smoothly, some "unpredicted" customer changes can be added easly into project then it is the best indicator that architecture is fine.

That's my humble human opinion ;)