Report: AI coding productivity gains cancelled out by other friction points that slow developers down

Atlassian says AI has created an 'unexpected paradox' for software developers – they're saving over 10 hours a week, but they’re still overworked and losing an equal amount of time due to ‘organizational inefficiencies’

While AI is helping save developers over 10 hours a week, these productivity boosts are being offset by growing workloads and poor operational efficiency, Atlassian says.

Survey: Software Development to Shift From Humans to AI

.... engineering teams are achieving substantial increases in developer velocity and productivity via AI coding. Software engineers are united in one area — the embrace of AI coding tools — but split on where the budget for those tools should come from and how AI will impact productivity moving forward. Notably, 45% of respondents anticipate offshoring ....

Report: AI coding productivity gains cancelled out by other friction points that slow developers down

AI adoption is saving developers a significant amount of time, but several friction points still exist throughout the software development life cycle that developers are still losing time to. According to Atlassian’s 2025 State of Developer Experience report, 99% of developers are saving time by using AI, and 68% save at least 10 hours a week. For the survey, Atlassian gathered responses from 3,500 developers from the US, Australia, France, Germ…