AI Is an Amplifier, Not a Shortcut
There’s a version of the AI story that engineering leaders want to hear. It goes like this: adopt AI coding tools, watch output multiply, ship faster, do more with less. Clean. Simple. Boardroom-ready. The data tells a different story. Not a worse one. Just a more honest one. We recently analyzed 2,172 developer-weeks of real coding activity across teams using GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Claude Code. The headline numbers are striking: power users show 4-14x higher activity than non-users.