I Looked Into How Devs Are Actually Using AI

It's not the size of the model that counts, it's how you use it. Try out Grok Bot: https://jetty.to/grokbot So as developers, we’ve been promised a lot. For about two years now we’ve been hearing some version of the same thing. With AI, you’re gonna actually become a 10x developer. You are gonna get so much more work done than ever before. Now, I gotta be honest. On my personal projects, oh I feel this. I’m seeing gains that blow way past 10x. But my side projects aren’t exactly representative of the industry. And even within the industry, everyone seems to be getting different results. I have dev friends in just about every part of it, from the big AI labs, to the Silicon Valley startup that just raised $50M, to enterprise like banks and defense. And what I’ve noticed is just how different their experience with AI is. Some of ’em are seeing only 2x gains, if that. Then you take a look at some others and they ship 2,000 PRs in a real production codebase in a single month. So I wanted to find out why. Why is there such a big gap in the benefits devs are seeing from AI? Sources: Lauren Tan, “shipped 2,500 PRs last month to production” (X, Sep 21, 2026): https://x.com/poteto/status/2102050467505430555 From AI-Assisted to AI-Native: Building a Frontier Development Team, Clare Liguori (AI Engineer World’s Fair, Aug 28, 2026): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqlWNihgdjI Redesigning source control at Anthropic (Anthropic, Oct 13, 2026): https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/redesigning-source-control Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity (METR, Jul 10, 2025): https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/ How to Quantify AI ROI in Software Engineering, Yegor Denisov-Blanch (AI Engineer Code Summit, Nov 2025): https://ai.engineer/talks/JvosMkuNxF8-quantify-ai-roi-in-software-engineering-stanford AI Engineering Report 2026: The Acceleration Whiplash (Faros AI, 2026): https://pages.faros.ai/hubfs/AI_Engineering_Report_2026_The_Acceleration_Whiplash_Faros.pdf How frontier teams are reinventing AI-native development (AWS, Jun 10, 2026): https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/how-frontier-teams-are-reinventing-ai-native-development/ Kiro (AWS): https://kiro.dev pstack, Part 1, Lauren Tan (X, 2026): https://x.com/poteto/status/2094457600259842065 Introducing Claude Opus 4.5 (Anthropic, Nov 24, 2025): https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-5 How teams build, Edition 01 (Linear, 2026): https://linear.app/data Wait, I thought Java was dead? (ForrestKnight, 2026): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhPs2sKlQYg A portion of this video was sponsored by Grok Bot. My Newsletter, Dev Notes (coming back soon) 👉 https://www.devnotesdaily.com/ My Socials 🐦 X: https://www.twitter.com/forrestpknight 🐙 GitHub: https://github.com/forrestknight 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/forrestpknight 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/forrestpknight