Beyond the Pull Request: What ChatGPT Teaches Us About Productivity
TL;DR for operators Most companies still ask the wrong first question about LLMs in software development: “Do they make developers write code faster?” That question is not useless. It is just too small. A recent paper by Sardar Bonabi, Sarah Bana, Vijay Gurbaxani, and Tingting Nian uses Italy’s temporary 2023 ChatGPT ban as a natural experiment to examine what happened to public GitHub activity when Italian developers abruptly lost access to ChatGPT, compared with similar developers in France and Portugal.1 The study covers 88,022 open-source software developers and looks at a 16-week window: eight weeks before the ban, four weeks during it, and four weeks after access was restored. ...