Developers say ai code is better, their ide logs say otherwise. an icse 2026 longitudinal study…
developers say ai code is better, their ide logs say otherwise. an icse 2026 longitudinal study found no significant quality change in the telemetry of ai users even as 48% of surveyed developers reported code quality going up, with deletions growing faster for ai users.
the gap between what devs believe and what the editor recorded is the real metric.
Context
The preprint Evolving with AI: A Longitudinal Analysis of Developer Logs (arXiv 2601.10258), at ICSE 2026 and conducted with JetBrains, analyses two years of telemetry from 800 developers, 151,904,543 logged events, plus a survey of 62 professionals. In the survey 48.4 percent say quality slightly or significantly increased and 9.7 percent say it decreased. In the telemetry it finds no significant change for AI users in debugging sessions, used as a quality proxy, and that AI users delete significantly more, by keystrokes, backspaces and undos.
The survey is perceived quality from 62 people, about 30 of whom said it rose. The telemetry measure is debugging sessions, a proxy for quality, and does not measure defects. The pairing of the two is the author's: the paper does not show perceptions contradicting a measured quality drop. That the gap is the real metric is the author's take.
Related work
- Earlier note on the same study ↗Same paper.
Watch next
- Replications with defect data.
Sources
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 20 September 2026 at 06:48 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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