+23% PRs, zero more features: the green graph no longer means anything
A Harvard study of 300 million work events: coding agents raise activity, not shipped features. Why volume is no longer a hiring signal.
+23% pull requests. +30% lines of code. And almost no more features in production.
That's the result of a Harvard study of about 300 million work events: 700,000 employees, 700 companies.
Coding agents do push activity up: +20% commits, +23% PRs. But the effect on features actually shipped is small, and not statistically significant.
Michael Hilton explains it with an idea from Fred Brooks that dates back to 1986. AI crushes accidental complexity, the work of translating an idea into code. It doesn't touch essential complexity: deciding what to build, and making the pieces hold together.
For anyone hiring engineers, the consequence is direct: volume no longer says anything. A nicely green contribution graph, a commit counter that keeps climbing, is now partly an agent's work.
What remains a signal is what the code does. And the decisions behind it.
That's why at Azerit, we have the code itself read, file by file, before scoring anyone.
