Stage 4 · Lesson 2 of 7
Measure where AI actually helps you
How much AI speeds you up is less obvious than it feels. In a 2025 , 16 experienced open source developers took 19% longer on real tasks when allowed AI tools, while believing they had been about 20% faster. METR's 2026 follow-up suggested a speed-up is now likely, but said its evidence on how large is weak.
Two-thirds of developers in the 2025 Stack Overflow survey said AI answers are often "almost right, but not quite". So measure for yourself. For two weeks, note for each task whether you used AI, roughly how long it took and how much fixing the output needed. You will find tasks where it clearly helps and tasks where it costs you time.
Common traptrusting the feeling of speed, or someone else's headline number, over your own evidence.
A question to check yourself, an AI practice session and 1 cheat sheet entry come when you add the roadmap to your account. Add it
Resources for this stage
Start with· follow one of these
- CoursePaidGrokking Prompt Engineering for Software Engineers
Design Gurus · Beginner · Subscription
Use AI assistants well on real engineering tasks, with prompts you can reuse
- CourseFreeClaude Code in Action
Anthropic · Intermediate
A free course on working with a coding agent on a real codebase