AI writes most code now, but most firms still do not ship faster
Most firms report no faster releases, and Glean's own gains are tangled with a bigger team with longer tenure.
20VC with Harry Stebbings · Why OpenAI and Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Glean FounderArvind Jain, the founder of the workplace AI company Glean, tracks where corporate AI money goes. The largest share goes to coding help, and the job has changed: most programmers now let AI produce the first draft instead of typing it themselves.
The result is code produced much faster. His question is whether companies ship products faster or not: "Are they shipping the products faster or not?" Jain says for other firms, the answer is mostly no: "the actual shipping speed of products has not increased", even though programming moves quicker, because typing is only a small part of getting software out the door.
His own experience shows why the gain is hard to measure. At Glean, far more lines are being written and features are going out at a greater pace, but the staff is also bigger with longer tenure. That growth is also a factor, and hard to tease apart from AI help. Engineering productivity "is one of the most difficult things to measure", the fuzziest job to judge.
Questions people ask
If shipping isn't faster, why do companies still pay for AI coding tools?
They still save developers time on repetitive typing, boilerplate, and first drafts, and many engineers prefer working that way. The bet is that the time saved can eventually be turned into faster shipping once testing, reviews, and product decisions catch up.
Does writing more lines of code mean engineers are more productive?
Not necessarily. More code can mean more features, but it can also mean bloated or duplicated code that is harder to maintain. That is why managers usually look at shipped features, reliability, and customer impact rather than lines written.
What slows down shipping if writing code is faster?
Shipping usually requires deciding what to build, designing it, reviewing code, testing it, fixing bugs, and rolling it out safely. If those steps take the same amount of time, faster typing alone will not move the release date much.