Azeem Azhar

Maybe the trend to product agent is going to help you do that.

Now, look, let's be clear that

These are companies talking about what they're doing.

I'm much more comfortable with what Coinbase said or Micron said, because they put really specific numbers on deployment and results.

Better, of course, to see what academics are doing.

And again, another fascinating paper from Chicago Booth, which is a business school by an academic called Supratin Sarkar.

And this was looking at developers who are using AI tools like Cursor to help them with their software development.

And if I could summarize it.

it was that senior developers are better at bossing AI around than junior ones.

Essentially, AI coding agents were more productive in the hands of experienced developers, not junior ones.

I mean, in a sense, you'd think, well, a junior one's going to get a leg up and that's going to help them quite a lot.

And if you think back to the

Wharton HBS BCG paper study from a year or so ago, what it showed was that people who were of below average competence were getting better improvements than those who are top quartile, which could proxy in software development to junior and senior.

So what's going on here?

AI autocomplete tools are skewed with juniors.

Senior developers are much more likely to accept

AI generated code than junior developers.

The reason we'll get into in a second.

When the academic looked at one particular company and they made AI agents the default, code output jumped by about 39%.

there was a difference in the way the developers approached it.