A Year of AI Pair Programming: What Actually Changed

A developer’s year with AI coding assistants like Copilot, Cursor, and Claude found big speedups on repetitive coding tasks.

Boilerplate, code generation, and other pattern-based work became much faster, changing the day-to-day feel of programming.

But architecture, debugging, and other novel engineering problems saw little improvement from the tools.

The article also cites GitHub and Google DORA research showing the strongest gains in routine tasks, with possible tradeoffs in delivery stability at the team level.