AI coding assistant trial: UK public sector findings report: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-coding-assista... - UK government. "GDS ran a trial of AI coding assistants (AICAs) across government from November 2024 to February 2025. [...] Trial participants saved an average of 56 minutes a working day when using AICAs"
Human + AI in Accounting: Early Evidence from the Field: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5240924 - "We document significant productivity gains among AI adopters, including a 55% increase in weekly client support and a reallocation of approximately 8.5% of accountant time from routine data entry toward high-value tasks such as business communication and quality assurance."
OECD: The effects of generative AI on productivity, innovation and entrepreneurship: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/the-effects-of-generati... - "Generative AI has proven particularly effective in automating tasks that are well-defined and have clear objectives, notably including some writing and coding tasks. It can also play a critical role for skill development and business model transformation, where it can serve as a catalyst for personalised learning and organisational efficiency gains, respectively [...] However, these potential gains are not without challenges. Trust in AI-generated outputs and a deep understanding of its limitations are crucial to leverage the potential of the technology. The reviewed experiments highlight the ongoing need for human expertise and oversight to ensure that generative AI remains a valuable tool in creative, operational and technical processes rather than a substitute for authentic human creativity and knowledge, especially in the longer term.".
That was a treat to explore. All of those are based on self-assessment surveys or toy problems. The UK report reads:
> On average, users reported time savings of 56 minutes per working day [...] It is also possible that survey respondents overestimated time saved due to optimism bias.
Yet in conclusion, this self-reported figure is stated as an independently observed fact. When people without ADHD take stimulants they also self-report increased productivity, higher accuracy, and faster task completion but all objective measurements are negatively affected.
The OECD paper supports their programming-related findings with the following gems:
- A study that measures productivity by the time needed to implement a "hello world" of HTTP servers [27]
- A study that measures productivity by the number of lines of code produced [28]
- A study co-authored by Microsoft that measures productivity of Microsoft employees using Microsoft Copilot by the number of pull requests they create. Then the code is reviewed by their Microsoft coworkers and the quality of those PRs is judged by the acceptance rate of those PRs. Unbelievably, the code quality doesn't only remain the same, it goes up! [30]
- An inspirational pro-AI paper co-authored by GitHub and Microsoft that's "shining a light on the importance of AI" aimed at "managers and policy-makers". [31]
> Yet in conclusion, this self-reported figure is stated as an independently observed fact. When people without ADHD take stimulants they also self-report increased productivity, higher accuracy, and faster task completion but all objective measurements are negatively affected.
Interesting analogy, because all those studies with objective measurements are defied by US students year by year, come finals seasons.
You can't really get high much on prescription-level dosages - that quickly gets tricky logistically and prohibitively expensive. People who look for highs go to the street for a reason.
You pointed out that students abuse stimulants for finals in spite of the evidence, were you just expanding on what I originally said, or is that meant to serve as counter-evidence implying that the research is wrong?
Regardless, I'm not saying it's a cheap or practical to get high this way, especially over the long term. People probably try stimulants because folk wisdom tells them that they'll get better grades. Then they get high and they feel like a superman from the dopamine rush, so they keep using them because they think it's materially improving their grades but really they're just getting high.
