Noisy
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The world is being quietly rearranged by people who write very long documents.

NBER · June 1, 2026
The title they went with Writing Code vs. Shipping Code: Productivity Effects Across Generations of AI Coding Tools Noisy translates that to

AI makes coders write more code. It does not make them ship more products.

What happened
AI coding tools make developers write much more code. But this extra code does not translate into more finished projects or more apps that people actually use.
Why it matters
Many companies are betting on AI to make their software teams much more productive. This paper shows that AI helps individual developers write code faster, but the bottlenecks are elsewhere. It turns out that shipping software involves more than just writing lines of code.
The signal
Watch for companies to shift their AI investments from coding tools to other parts of the software development process, like testing or deployment.
If you insist
Read the original →