We conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to understand how early-2025 AI tools affect the productivity of experienced open-source developers working on their own repositories. Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19% longer than without—AI makes them slower. We view this result as a snapshot of early-2025 AI capabilities in one relevant setting; as these systems continue to rapidly evolve, we plan on continuing to use this methodology to help estimate AI ...| metr.org
Why modularity matters To see why modularity is so critical in software design, consider what goes wrong when it’s missing. For the programmer, life becomes miserable. Whenever you need to understand or modify some piece of functionality, there’s no single place in the code to go to, and you may have to visit many widely separated locations (and just finding them can be a major challenge). Even removing (let alone adding) functionality is hard, because the parts of the codebase are all in...| essenceofsoftware.com
A brief intro to concept design in three parts.| essenceofsoftware.com