I watched my team's output drop 40% after we switched to an AI code assistant

Three months ago my manager decided to roll out this AI coding tool across our team of 12 developers. I was skeptical but figured it would help with boilerplate stuff. Fast forward to last week and I pulled the numbers for our sprint velocity. We went from shipping around 30 story points per sprint down to barely hitting 18. The big problem was that people stopped double-checking the AI's output. It would suggest something that looked right but had hidden logic errors. We spent way more time debugging than we saved in writing code. I sat in on a few code reviews and noticed 4 or 5 cases where the AI suggested a solution that worked but was completely inefficient. Has anyone else seen this kind of drop in quality after bringing AI tools into a dev team?

2 comments

2 Comments

fisher.taylor13d ago

My buddy's team at a marketing firm tried using an AI to write their email campaigns last year. They saved like 10 hours a week on drafting but then their open rates tanked by 25% because the AI kept using these weird formal phrases no real person would say. They ended up having to re-write half the stuff anyway and their manager finally pulled the plug after a client complained about how canned everything sounded.

ryan_flores13d ago

Best move is to treat AI like a junior copywriter you gotta babysit. Give it strong examples of your past winning emails and a SPECIFIC tone guide before letting it loose.