Harvard AI coding agents study

A Harvard economics paper by Fiona Chen and James Stratton found AI coding agents raised lines of code written by 30% across 718 firms, but the gain did not translate to more shipped software at the firm level, with code review times rising 49% and the share of pull requests requiring changes nearly doubling.

Firm employment did not change, and the study, covering roughly 700,000 workers across 700 firms, noted AI authorship metadata in commit histories may need attention under retention schedules and legal holds.

JetBrains Research paper published arguing coding-agent benchmarks don't match real developer usage patterns

DavidLinthicum summarized the Harvard study findings on X, noting productivity gains do not pass through to shipped software and review times jumped 49%.