The ai productivity story just got an audit. a study of 137,592 commits from public repos, out…
the ai productivity story just got an audit. a study of 137,592 commits from public repos, out september 10, says google, microsoft and meta improved 150% per developer over 18 months.
read the commit history before believing the blog post.
Context
Navigara's Open Source Engineering Performance Report, Q1 2025 to Q2 2026, with a press release dated September 10, 2026 and a report page indexed at September 7, covers 137,592 qualifying commits to 65 public repositories across six organizations over a 78-week window. The report's open cohort reads +150% in Q2 2026 (N = 699) against the Q1 2025 baseline (N = 637), and the six organizations are Google, Meta, Microsoft, Cloudflare, Vercel and OpenAI. The unit is scored output per qualifying software engineer, a contributor with commits in at least 10 of the 78 weeks. The report says it makes only descriptive and correlational claims, that nothing in it counts tools, licences or assistant sessions, and it states Navigara's commercial interest.
The 150% is the six-organization aggregate and not a figure for Google, Microsoft and Meta, whose per-organization numbers on the page are +138.0%, +123.2% and +38.0%, with the horizon label of each column not resolved. A fixed panel of 388 engineers reads +82% year over year, and Q1 to Q2 2026 is +17.5% with an interval of -0.7% to +38.8% that includes zero, with cohort sizes down at all six organizations. Because the study counts no AI usage, it does not show AI caused the change, and a vendor-run analysis of public repositories is not an independent audit. The press release's other engineer counts are a different snapshot. The AI productivity story just got an audit is the author's framing.
Related work
- Engineering performance jumped 150% per developer in 18 months ↗The earlier note on the same study.
Watch next
- Per-organization horizon labels.
Sources
- Navigara Research: open source engineering performance report, Q1 2025 to Q2 2026research.navigara.com
- Navigara press release (September 10, 2026)webwire.com
- Navigara: methodologyresearch.navigara.com
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 22 September 2026 at 12:41 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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