Why AI coding claims don't add up (News)

What up, nerds? Sheboy. I'm Jared, and this is Change Log News for the week of Monday, 09/08/2025. A shorter than usual episode this week and no new pods because Adam and I are flying to California to hang with the Oxide team during their annual internal conference. We hope to have some sweet content for you on the backside of this trip. Fingers crossed. I'll get a chance to shout in their data center. What I'm going to do is not recommended. This is not supported. Do not try and disappoint. Okay. Let's get into this week's news. Why AI coding claims don't add up. Mike Judge, no, not that Mike Judge, has been coding for twenty five plus years. He was an early adopter of AI coding and a fan until a couple months ago. Now he's mad, furious even. Quote, I read the meter study and suddenly got serious doubts. In that study, the authors discovered that developers were unreliable narrators of their own productivity. They thought AI was making them 20% faster, but it was actually making them 19% slower. This shocked me because I had just told someone the week before that I thought AI was only making me about 25% faster, and I was bummed. It wasn't a higher number. I was only off by 5% from the developer's own incorrect estimates, end quote. That study left him unsettled, so he put himself to the test. For six weeks, he tested his own productivity with and without AI. What he found was really disappointing. Quote, I discovered that the data isn't statistically significant at any meaningful level. That I would need to record new data points for another four months just to prove if AI was speeding me up or slowing me down at all. I can say definitively that I'm not seeing any massive increase in speed, as in two x, using AI coding tools, end quote. That got Mike thinking, is he the only one or are we all delusional? To answer that, he asked a simple question. Quote, if so many developers are so extraordinarily productive using these tools, where is the flood of shovelware? We should be seeing apps of all shapes and sizes, video games, new websites, mobile apps, software as a service apps, we should be drowning in choice. We should be in the middle of an indie software revolution. We should be seeing 10,000 Tetris clones on Steam, end quote. That question sent him further down the rabbit hole. Click through for receipts. Cactoid wants to be the ultimate RSVP platform. I have been prompting the open source community to kill Meetup for years. It looks like the folks behind Cactoid are taking a crack at it. Quote, like the cactus, great events bloom under any condition when managed with care. Cactoid helps you streamline RSVPs, simplify coordination, and keep every detail efficient so your gatherings are resilient, vibrant, and unforgettable, end quote. They've started off simply, …