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That's exactly what's happening. Many claim they are more productive with AI, but individual rise in productivity just doesn't translate to projects being completed any sooner.

And by "projects", I mean corporate ones with big teams involved. Hobby projects actually do get finished much faster.

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In the corporate world, writing code was always a small chunk anyway. Iirc something like 30% of employee time. Getting 50% faster there still only gains back 10% of your time.

To further complicate matters, you had to spend on AI software and potentially additional on legal/risk/security/compliance to enable that.

The smaller the company, the bigger that % of coding is of total time (all the way down to hobby where the majority of time is spent coding)

Where I work, I would guess that, out of the amount of person-hours spent on a project, less than 5% of it is the cumulative time spent designing and writing code. There's so much other stuff going on: Requirements gathering, "aligning" with other teams, human reviews, QA, presenting to executives, waiting for approval from executives, reporting status, deploying to staging, internal dogfooding, slow ramp-ups to production... This is how projects that are 50 lines of code take 3 months to deploy. AI is helping reduce the time spent on that 2%.

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