Carnegie Mellon University

A joint Carnegie Mellon and JetBrains study finds that engineers' token spend is only weakly linked to shipped output: for the same engineer, doubling spend corresponded to roughly 10% more commits. The work linked five weeks of coding-agent token usage to commits from 404 JetBrains engineers, backed by a 412-person company survey. The authors recommend using token spend only for budgeting and judging agent-assisted work by task and outcome evidence.