August 07, 2025
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Devs who use AI are rated 9% less competent on average than their peers, a new study suggests. And the competency penalty is harsher for women.
AI use in coding fields is near-ubiquitous: 98% of respondents to LeadDev’s AI Impact Report 2025 say they have either adopted or are exploring the use of AI tools, and 59% of them say AI has increased their productivity.
But that AI adoption comes at a cost among your peers, according to a new study published in Harvard Business Review. The experiment gave more than 1,000 engineers identical snippets of Python code to evaluate, and were told that it was either written by another engineer alone, or another engineer with AI assistance.
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August 07, 2025
