Comment by Aurornis

> A quarter of the participants saw increased performance, 3/4 saw reduced performance.

The study used 246 tasks across 16 developers, for an average of 15 tasks per developer. Divide that further in half because tasks were assigned as AI or not-AI assisted, and the sample size per developer is still relatively small. Someone would have to take the time to review the statistics, but I don’t think this is a case where you can start inferring that the developers who benefited from AI were just better at using AI tools than those who were not.

I do agree that it would be interesting to repeat a similar test on developers who have more AI tool assistance, but then there is a potential confounding effect that AI-enthusiastic developers could actually lose some of their practice in writing code without the tools.