As a developer in 2025, you cannot say 10 words without AI being at least 2 of those words. Despite its near ubiquitous nature in developer conversations, opinions range from the most useless tech since Blu-ray to we should all be out of jobs yesterday. When articles discuss developer productivity opinions range just as much. From GitHub claiming AI helps cut 55% percent of the time from a Task to a METR study saying developers feel more productive but actually are actually 19% slower. As a cautious adopter of AI, I want to discuss two truths and a lie about developer productivity in my experience. Which one is the lie?
- AI can help developers ramp up on new technologies or projects faster
- AI will speed up my development for new features
- AI development is another skill and will improve as you improve
For both truths, pitfalls exist as a developer you should avoid and for the lie there is a grain of truth in it as well. Let’s discuss.
Truth: AI can help developers ramp up on new technologies or projects faster
Every developer has had the experience of coming to a new tech stack or project and taking longer trying to find where to look than actually doing the coding. Now you can ask Copilot (or any other AI assistant) to explain at a high level the project or the framework vs something you are familiar with. It can also help navigate by asking the AI assistant to show you where the piece of code you are looking for lives at.
A note of caution exists here because there is no replacement for the developer “feel” of being able to navigate and expect where the correct area of code is in a project. I have had the experience of trying to use a new framework in a personal project and because I used AI, I lacked a fundamental piece of knowledge when a more complex task came about. A coworker described a way to use AI as a concurrent developer. You attempt to beat your head into the proverbial wall and have your copilot redirect you. Instead of vibe coding to success, drive along the path together and make sure you understand what it just spit out at you.
Lie: AI will speed up my development for new features
Developers all over the world are turning to AI to aid in their workflow but results have varied for how AI has affected them. Developer speed has always been a funny concept because some of the best developers I know are slow, methodical, and exact. The less bugs occur the faster real development occurs. AI vibe coding can really quickly get you “something”. But there is a huge difference between 80% working and 100% working.
The truth is that AI CAN be used to make more effective developers. It just isn’t as simple as adding copilot to your workflow. It takes time spent using AI, training, skill, and a preexisting understanding of software to best use AI. And it is not a one-size-fits-all thing, you need to figure out how you can best be the “engineer in the loop”.
Truth: AI development is another skill and will improve as you improve
Development is truly an art form that has skill and flare that can be expressed by the lines of code you write. AI is an extension to the developer and the process of development. AI will go to the level of the developer, not the other way around. If you know the right words and correct terms, AI will have to do less guessing around the implementation. Consider the difference between “Implement a login page” and “Implement a login screen using the following external Oauth2.0 providers, Google and Microsoft”. One leaves the decisions up to Copilot. Maybe it does a simple username and password that it validates server side. Does it implement salting and hashing? Does password validation occur? Or does it return the correct user data?
The greatest challenge for learning coding nowadays will be how to separate learning how to code and learning how to use AI to code. One is about learning the fundamental ideas and concepts so you can more effectively use AI to do real feature work. Akin to how even though math can now be done by computers we still teach kids how to add, subtract, multiply and divide. AI powered learning will become the norm, but understanding is still the learning objective.
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