Talk · UC Irvine software engineering seminar · October 30, 2026
Why aren’t we shipping faster now?
AI, activity, and outcomes in software engineering
21 minutes, with captions. Also on YouTube.
Slides
- Handout19 pages, 3.8 MB
One page per picture. The version to read. - Full deck41 pages, 4.0 MB
Every build step, as shown in the talk.
Papers
Cha, Badea, Baym, Bird, Butler, Murphy-Hill, Hadley. The Activity-Outcome Gap: Why AI Does Not Solve Software Engineering. In submission, 2026. The 30 interviews; a link will appear here when the paper is public.
Demirer, Musolff, Yang. Writing Code vs. Shipping Code: Productivity Effects Across Generations of AI Coding Tools. NBER Working Paper 35275, 2026. nber.org/papers/w35275
Choudhuri, Butler, Bird, Badea, Houck, Sarma. “To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before”: What Has AI Let Developers Unlock? 2026. arXiv:2610.23708
Jensen Huang, Computex keynote, Taipei, 29 May 2023, as reported by Reuters.
Yang, He, Cheng, Butler, Murphy-Hill, Badea, Bird. (When) Should a Software Factory Be Lights-Off? Benchmarking Code Review Agents on Bug Detection. 2026. arXiv:2610.13668
Choudhuri, Bird, Badea, Gerosa, Sarma. You Shall Not Pass! Where and Why Developers Draw the Line on AI Autonomy. 2026. arXiv:2607.00533
Miller, Choudhuri, Ulloa, Haniyur, DeLine, Storey, Murphy-Hill, Bird, Butler. “Maybe We Need Some More Examples”: Individual and Team Drivers of Developer GenAI Tool Use. ICSE 2026. arXiv:2507.21280