Study Finds AI Coding Tools Fail to Speed Up Software Delivery
A research talk drawing on 30 interviews and multiple papers argues that AI coding tools boost code-writing activity but do not translate into faster software delivery, creating an activity-outcome gap. The authors attribute the bottleneck to downstream work such as review, integration, testing and coordination rather than coding itself.
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Contents3 sections
Talk · UC Irvine software engineering seminar · October 30, 2026
Why aren’t we shipping faster now?
AI, activity, and outcomes in software engineering
21 minutes, with captions. Also on YouTube.
Slides
- Handout19 pages, 3.8 MB One page per picture. The version to read.
- Full deck41 pages, 4.0 MB Every build step, as shown in the talk.
Papers
Cha, Badea, Baym, Bird, Butler, Murphy-Hill, Hadley. The Activity-Outcome Gap: Why AI Does Not Solve Software Engineering. In submission, 2026. The 30 interviews; a link will appear here when the paper is public.
Demirer, Musolff, Yang. Writing Code vs. Shipping Code: Productivity Effects Across Generations of AI Coding Tools. NBER Working Paper 35275, 2026. nber.org/papers/w35275
Choudhuri, Butler, Bird, Badea, Houck, Sarma. “To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before”: What Has AI Let Developers Unlock? 2026. arXiv.23708
Jensen Huang, Computex keynote, Taipei, 29 May 2023, as reported by Reuters.
Yang, He, Cheng, Butler, Murphy-Hill, Badea, Bird. (When) Should a Software Factory Be Lights-Off? Benchmarking Code Review Agents on Bug Detection. 2026. arXiv.13668
Choudhuri, Bird, Badea, Gerosa, Sarma. You Shall Not Pass! Where and Why Developers Draw the Line on AI Autonomy. 2026. arXiv.00533
Miller, Choudhuri, Ulloa, Haniyur, DeLine, Storey, Murphy-Hill, Bird, Butler. “Maybe We Need Some More Examples”: Individual and Team Drivers of Developer GenAI Tool Use. ICSE 2026. arXiv.21280