> A study of more than 450 engineers at Microsoft in 2025 showed developers spend only 14 percent of their time writing code
This feels about right as an average across project cycles and different types of companies, and is the same type of number I've suggested here before.
The obvious conclusion is that even if AI reduced coding time to zero, then it would only reduce software development time by that 14%.
Of course AI may be used for other aspects of the job as well as coding, but on the flip side any serious use of AI requires a human in the loop to give work to the AI, steer the AI, assess the output, etc.
It's interesting that this 14% figure is close to Uber's choice to limit AI spend to 10% of developers salary. I wonder where that Uber number came from?
Another rather startling datapoint on the perceived value of AI comes from Microsoft who are also adopting budgeted AI usage, and are looking for "outcomes that move the needle". Their budget guidelines apparently refer to (current? targeted?) per-developer AI usage of "hundreds of dollars a month to a few thousand dollars in tokens".
This feels about right as an average across project cycles and different types of companies, and is the same type of number I've suggested here before.
The obvious conclusion is that even if AI reduced coding time to zero, then it would only reduce software development time by that 14%.
Of course AI may be used for other aspects of the job as well as coding, but on the flip side any serious use of AI requires a human in the loop to give work to the AI, steer the AI, assess the output, etc.
It's interesting that this 14% figure is close to Uber's choice to limit AI spend to 10% of developers salary. I wonder where that Uber number came from?
Another rather startling datapoint on the perceived value of AI comes from Microsoft who are also adopting budgeted AI usage, and are looking for "outcomes that move the needle". Their budget guidelines apparently refer to (current? targeted?) per-developer AI usage of "hundreds of dollars a month to a few thousand dollars in tokens".
https://www.techradar.com/pro/tokenmaxxing-is-not-what-we-ar...