In this episode, I'm joined by Dean Kerr and Amy Laws to discuss 'The Experiment' – a four‑week study we ran to explore how AI really affects software development. Instead of synthetic benchmarks, the project team tackled genuine issues in an open‑source project, alternating between AI‑assisted work and going completely 'cold turkey'.

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Scott Logic

A podcast transcript from Scott Logic where CTO Colin Eberhardt discusses a four-week experiment measuring AI's real-world impact on software development with developers Dean Kerr and Amy Laws. The team alternated between AI-assisted and completely AI-free ('cold turkey') work on genuine open-source issues in Mock Service Worker. Key findings: AI roughly doubled velocity (1.9x), but the more revealing insights came from the cold turkey phase — developers discovered how deeply dependent they'd become on AI for summarization, search, and contextual answers, not just code generation. Dean developed an Analysis → Implementation → Reflection agentic loop using red/green TDD to improve AI output quality. Amy found that handcrafting code without AI restored a sense of pride and problem-solving joy she hadn't realized she'd lost. The group concludes that AI hasn't eliminated the fun of software development, but has fundamentally shifted where that satisfaction comes from — and raises concerns about how junior developers will build foundational skills in an AI-first environment.

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