Engineering performance jumped 150% per developer in 18 months, and the gap shows where the tooling…
engineering performance jumped 150% per developer in 18 months, and the gap shows where the tooling went. a commit-level study of big tech, reported september 10, credits ai for the gain while activity metrics fail to capture it.
the codebase got faster; the scoreboard didn't.
Context
A Navigara press release of 10 September 2026, an engineering measurement vendor, reports 137,592 commits from public repositories of Google, Microsoft, Meta, Cloudflare, Vercel and OpenAI. It says that in Q2 2026, 705 qualifying engineers delivered as much scored throughput as 1,736 engineers at Q1 2025 rates, and that the aggregate change this quarter is plus 17.5 percent against Q1 2026 with a 95 percent confidence interval of minus 0.7 to plus 38.8 percent, statistically indistinguishable from no change.
Vendor-reported, not independent, and limited to the public repositories of six organizations. The headline says 150 percent; 1,736 over 705 is about 2.46, roughly plus 146 percent by simple arithmetic, a rounding difference and not a contradiction, and the exact derivation was not in the text read. The 18 months runs from Q1 2025 to Q2 2026 and the unit is scored throughput of merged commits, not delivered product. Credits AI for the gain and activity metrics fail to capture it were not found in the text read, and no causal attribution is shown. The latest quarter's change sits inside the confidence interval.
Related work
- Earlier note in this batch family: Oracle's reported remarks ↗Delivery against coding speed, different unit and source.
Watch next
- Navigara's full report for the derivation, method and funding.
Sources
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 21 September 2026 at 01:05 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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