AI made devs feel 20% faster but measured 19% slower. Nobody's ready for that conversation.

AI tools made developers feel 20% faster. Then researchers measured them at 19% slower . Read that again. That's not a rounding error. That's a 39-percentage-point gap between perception and reality. And nobody in this industry wants to talk about it. The Study That Should Make You Uncomfortable The METR study used a randomized controlled trial. Not a survey. Not a blog post. Not a vendor-sponsored benchmark. A proper experiment. They took experienced open-source contributors and had them work o