Harvard study finds AI coding agents boost output but slow PR review; a personal repo test complicates it
A Harvard working paper analyzing about 300 million work records from roughly 700 companies found that adopting AI coding agents raised pull requests by 23% and code output by 30%, while issue resolution rates did not change significantly. The bottleneck was review, as merge times rose 49% and revision requests nearly doubled. A developer tested this on two side projects started with Claude, finding that commits with AI co-author trailers were more often fix or revert commits than those without. However, that gap largely disappeared after accounting for commit title habits, the uneven timing of the comparison group, and commit size differences. The author concludes the two repositories alone cannot show whether AI-assisted commits are revised more or less often.
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