AI usage patterns in software teams (linear.app)
147 points by giuliomagnifico 13 hours ago
cmiles8 an hour ago
Usage does not correlate with valued output or ROI. This article smells like a bad attempt to say hey guys our customers see ROI without any actual evidence that they do.
Also, somewhat amusingly, the “founder” consistently being at the top of the use curve might just have something to do with everyone else also using it, but that more implies people are using it because the chief at the top wants them to use it… not because it’s actually useful. A pattern that’s typical of bad AI deployments.
blfr 32 minutes ago
> Usage does not correlate with valued output or ROI
This sounds possible but how can we know? It could just as well correlate. Effort of all kinds correlates with success even when it's not obvious or not... linear.
danggggg 14 minutes ago
> > Usage does not correlate with valued output or ROI
>This sounds possible but how can we know?
If usage correlated with ROI, we would never stop hearing about it from the big AI firms.
The fact is that a bunch of marks and rubes got suckered into buying snake oil.
danggggg an hour ago
Frankly, it seems obvious to me that AI has negative efficiency (0.25x as efficient as the old way? 0.125x as efficient as the old way? 0.0625x as efficient as the old way?)
AI has created a generation of 0.125x engineers.
drodgers 34 minutes ago
Skill issue.
If you make an effort to use the new tools effectively, the gains are wild. Don't fall into a grumpy luddite trap, the train is leaving the station and you'll struggle to catch up if you don't learn and grow.
Not using AI for software development in 2027 will be like only knowing how to program via punchcard in 2010.
It's new. It's different. It's hard. It's your job. Learn how to use it effectively, embrace the new abundance mindset.
danggggg 22 minutes ago
gkamal 10 hours ago
This looks like measuring what is easy to do, rather than what really matters.
PR open counts, issues created , ceos/founders spending more time on linear don't automatically lead to better outcomes (in my experience they are often negatively correlated:-) )
onion2k 6 hours ago
This looks like measuring what is easy to do, rather than what really matters.
Even that's hard. There aren't enough signals to attribute changes directly to AI, so these apps seem to correlate the signal that the user was interacting with AI to the changes they made e.g "Bob used AI at that time, and they opened a PR at a similar time, so Bob probably used AI to make that PR."
Until the tooling for gathering data on AI usage improves the data will be fairly interesting because correlations often point to something related, but won't be a source of truth.
Fordec 6 hours ago
Yeah all of these along with raw token usage are metrics that were being used around December to February by people who just didn't have anything to go off yet.
Skill/Hook usage rates, budget spend, auto-approval rate, focus area heatmaps, MTTR, MTTD are all there now
hexasquid 7 hours ago
I'd be interested to overlay, I don't know, customer satisfaction or anything that can show the follow-on effect of all this output. Linear won't have that information.
My guess is some will jump up (where the team has managed to make themselves move effective and responsive) and many will plummet (doesn't need explaining).
Then there might be something to look at.
onion2k 6 hours ago
I'd be interested to overlay, I don't know, customer satisfaction or anything that can show the follow-on effect of all this output. Linear won't have that information.
Very few businesses can accurately attribute customer value to the work they do, especially once they're passed start-up scale. A mature company makes lots of small changes and they're rarely measurable.
AlexKalWork 3 hours ago
This looks like a "We are so AI native and efficient!!" article. At least, they could delve deeper into how they define the metrics and how they collected the data.
sebiandev 8 hours ago
this seems inappropriate. I think its a bad paradigm that just because you use a platform's service, they get intimate details about your usage. And for them to be so bold about publishing the statistics they've stolen from their customers data? Gives me a reason to never recommend my org use this platform.
clintonb 7 hours ago
The data is aggregated, and you cannot possibly identify a single user from what's been published. I see no issue here.
giraffe_lady 5 hours ago
I think their point is that there's business value in the usage data and linear is using that value in a way that benefits them but not the customers they got it from.
It reminds me of matt levine's reframing of insider trading where it's not about fairness it's about theft. You're supposed to get secret insights and use them to get an edge. What you can't do is get an edge for yourself with secret insights that your employer got.
So it roughly comes down to "that data is valuable and rightfully belongs to the originating company." Which then makes this a contract diligence type situation.
clintonb 3 hours ago
whateveracct 6 hours ago
lol isn't this what google said and yet..the NSA cometh
anon7000 5 hours ago
I’d rather it was published for free in a blog post than sold without my knowledge. As a linear user. This shit doesn’t matter, everyone in the industry know these kinds of stats are being tracked, I’m happy for a company to be transparent about it.
rightbyte 3 hours ago
Why would a company want to leak its processes and workflows to another company in a capitalist system. Seems sloppy and a short sighted transfer of wealth to external stockowners.
humbleharbinger 8 hours ago
Uhh that's how a lot of economic data works too. Guess how we get a lot of jobs data... ADP
sebiandev 7 hours ago
Oh hey! My industry. Guess what? ADP doesnt just yoink your data. ADP conducts voluntary surveys on the scale of hundreds of thousands. Voluntary. ADP also pays for it for the most part. Do you think Linear conducted..voluntary surveys here?
jmtulloss 5 hours ago
This is pretty interesting but I wish it would have been refined in two ways:
- The prose before the data appears to be AI generated. Not a big deal but it makes the reader work harder to figure out what's actually being said.
- Linear didn't control for their platforms AI changes over the past year. The platform has become much more AI integrated, so a lot of numbers will move. I'm not sure how you do it but this is only useful signal with a control.
jdw64 11 hours ago
These days, my work has become: generate code for 20 minutes, then spend an hour reading it.
tankaiji 11 hours ago
And then more hours cleaning it up and re-prompting.
nik282000 7 hours ago
I program as a hobby, personal projects because I can.
I recently set up a local llm to see what the fuss is about and other than the few ringer solutions my experience is as you described. 2min promping, 5min waiting, 3hrs debugging or just doing it myself.
I am very likely doing it wrong, and it does speed up some aspects, but I wouldn't say I trust llm code any more than my own. Until it runs and throws an error, the llm is 100% confident that it has written perfect code.
nightmunnas 3 hours ago
anon7000 5 hours ago
jdm2212 6 hours ago
viccis 7 hours ago
TingPing 7 hours ago
danggggg 11 hours ago
Why not just write the code yourself? To me it seems like methodically constructing the pull request by hand is probably faster than lazily prompting and re-prompting.
conradludgate 6 hours ago
denkmoon 10 hours ago
viccis 6 hours ago
sandeepkd 7 hours ago
jdw64 11 hours ago
johnxianren 7 hours ago
Felt that. I already gave DeepSeek the HTML and it still said the UI was good to go, then told me it has no vision.
ReptileMan 3 hours ago
Like the Titan submarine team's moto mine is - real men test in production.
The LLM produce so much code that the best I can is skim and look for obvious flaws, also pass it trough adversarial one.
whateveracct 6 hours ago
I spend 45 minutes writing it. then i git commit and move on cuz i made something good.
who is winning here? lol
danggggg an hour ago
> I spend 45 minutes writing it. then i git commit and move on cuz i made something good.
I cannot express strongly enough how much I'd rather work with you than with someone writing a 1000-word essay on how AI code generation is actually good enough this time.
danggggg 11 hours ago
That's gotta be at least 10x or 20x more efficient than the old way of doing things.
dullcrisp 11 hours ago
It could be. Or it could be 1x, or 0.2x. You don’t have enough information to make that judgment.
danggggg 11 hours ago
hobofan 4 hours ago
I think it's worth noting that headlines like "AI adoption has spread to every function" is only limited to roles covered/tracked by Linear.
Recent studies by e.g. Google show a much broader range of adoption.
cadamsdotcom 4 hours ago
Nice data!
Tim (author) if you're there: it'd be amazing to see the split of which agents people are using, if you have that data.
agnishom 8 hours ago
I didn't know Linear has "AI features". Linear is boring, but that's actually fine by me.
I use LLMs to write my code, but this does not show up in this data.
greatgib 11 hours ago
"Pull requests are up 111% in two years". Would be more honest to say that the number of pull requests "detected" by linear are up XXX%. Because it only works if you setup git repo tracking and use it properly. And at that point it is not obvious if more teams are using linear and using it correctly, or if the number of PR really increased that much!
well_ackshually an hour ago
Doubling PRs isn't necessarily unbelievable. AI reduces ceremony around PRs, makes the small shitty changes that you never had time to do possible and the larger cleanups at least doable.
Double the PRs doesn't mean double the output.
slopsosn 9 hours ago
The AI Slopologists strike again. More garbage by garbage people.
prolly97 3 hours ago
Is this just an opinion? If so, fair.
If it's an attempt at rebutting their claims etc, it'd be easier to interact if you provided some data, or concrete observations :)
subarctic 8 hours ago
Can't tell if you mean the people the article is talking about or the article itself
what 8 hours ago
¿Por qué no los dos?
joegibbs an hour ago
I might build a Chrome extension that looks for “AI” in HN submission titles and shows a fake comment at the start saying “AI is all slop garbage that’s total slop and I hate it. AI sucks and it’s slop!”
It will save people time reading the 5-10 other identical vacuous comments
danggggg an hour ago
Do you have a rebuttal or are you just mad that people don't like AI?
It sucks at generating code and AI true believers have made my job hell.
joegibbs 31 minutes ago
0xbadcafebee 11 hours ago
> Time spent on customer requests, docs, and projects held steady [..] AI has so far changed how teams execute far more than how they decide what to build
I think the measurement for this may be flawed. We do mostly use AI to decide how to build. But what we build is influenced by AI-driven research into a problem or task. That's largely done in coding and desktop AI tools, not Linear Asks/AI.
I'm working on accelerating my team's work by implementing AI-driven code pipelines with guardrails to eliminate as much unnecessary review time as possible. Also making a chatbot for turning repetitive tasks & PRs into buttons, and an "architectural guidance" chatbot that gives advice tailored to our business, software/system architecture, cloud, standards, etc. This puts AI and automated jobs in the center of both how (automated task) and what (architecture guidance).
But this has a not-so-great implication for Linear. With my tools, a human never has to touch a ticket, so we could use any ticketing system with an API or CLI. Linear is a great product because they made a great interface. What happens when I replace their interface with a chat bot?