A study covered by MIT Sloan followed 187,000 developers on GitHub from a year before an AI coding assistant launched through two years after. With the tool, core coding went up 12.4%. Project management activity went down 24.9%. And collaboration with peers fell by nearly 80%. One researcher called it the isolating effect of technology.
I think the first three numbers are what the tools promised, and the fourth is the bill. Developers given a tool that answers their questions stopped asking each other. That is a rational choice for each developer on each day. Across a team over two years it is something else: fewer people who know what their colleagues are working on, fewer chances to catch a mistake in conversation.
My view is that an 80% drop in collaboration is a management problem wearing a productivity headline. The tools did not cause it on their own. They removed the reason most collaboration happened, which was need. I think the knowledge-sharing that used to come free with needing each other now has to be built in on purpose: review that is actually a conversation, pairing that is scheduled, and a norm that asking a person is still a good first move.
Has your team's collaboration changed since the tools arrived, and did anyone decide that, or did it just happen?
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