PartialCoding
Use AI coding tools on your own mature open-source repo
Tools: Cursor + Claude 3.5/3.7 (early 2025)
Setup, access, approval gate, failure notes
- Setup / prompt
- Randomized trial: 16 experienced maintainers, real issues, AI allowed vs. disallowed.
- Access required
- Developers' own repositories
- HITL checkpoint
- Developers fully in the loop
- Outcome & failure notes
- Developers were 19% slower with AI while believing they were ~20% faster. Time went to prompting, waiting, and reviewing. METR changed its study design in 2026, and later evidence is more mixed, so treat this as context-specific.
- Evidence type
- Randomized controlled trial
Source: METR · 2025-07-10 · Checked 2026-10-19