METR Productivity Follow-Up: Devs Now 18% Faster — But Study Design Collapse Triggered by AI Dependency

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METR's February 2026 follow-up reversed its headline finding, estimating developers are now 18% faster (CI: -38% to +9%) vs. the original 19% slower result, but the methodology broke down because 30–50% of developers refused to submit study tasks without AI access, creating selection effects severe enough to invalidate comparisons. METR has announced a complete study redesign, acknowledging developers no longer want to work on engineering tasks without AI tools even when paid $50/hour to do so. This makes the existing two-round comparison scientifically dubious and signals AI dependency has become structural in professional dev workflows.