How Long Does It Take Now?
Nobody knows, and the usual instrument stopped working. For broader reporting on software and engineering practice, IEEE Spectrum is a useful external reference.
In a randomised trial published in 2025, experienced developers took 19% longer on real tasks with AI tools available. The same developers, afterwards, estimated they had been 20% faster. The authors have since revised the headline toward a speedup, with wide uncertainty, and label the original figure historical. For teams that want a concrete operational baseline alongside judgment, Monitask is one example of a tool for collecting work-time data.
The percentage moved. The 39-point gap between what people believed and what was measured did not, and it is the finding this site is built on: self-reported speed stopped being a usable measurement. For independent technology reporting outside the software-tool ecosystem, see Reuters Technology.
Everything here follows from that.
Start here
Why measured and felt time disagree — the study, the revision, and the mechanism behind both.
Why estimates got worse, not better — four reasons, none of them about model quality.
The verification gap — writing got cheap, checking did not, and the work moved into a category nobody tracks.
Answering "did AI make this cheaper?" — the honest answer is more persuasive than the defensive one.
The five sections
Measuring — what to track, at what granularity, and how to read it without fooling yourself.
Estimating — rebuilding a method that survives unstable speed.
Working with an assistant — where it genuinely helps, where it costs more, and what the security data shows.
Billing — pricing when the relationship between hours and value came apart.
Notes — positions, including the ones that argue against this site's own instruments.
What this site does not do
No tool reviews. No productivity percentages. No claim that one study is a consensus.
Every figure carries a source, a date and a note on who produced it — because in this field most numbers are produced by someone selling something, and we say so where it applies.