The UC Irvine software engineering presentation leveraged several 2026 academic studies to dissect the persistent gap between writing code and shipping completed products. It examined specialized topics including code review agents, AI autonomy levels, and developer adoption trends. Additionally, the seminar incorporated perspectives from an upcoming paper by Cha and colleagues that explored this productivity disconnect through 30 targeted interviews.
Key points
Heightened coding activity powered by artificial intelligence does not necessarily transl…: Heightened coding activity powered by artificial intelligence does not necessarily translate into faster software deployment outcomes.
Multiple recent studies indicate an activity-outcome gap persists across modern software…: Multiple recent studies indicate an activity-outcome gap persists across modern software engineering workflows despite generative tooling.
Full video documentation and supplementary reading materials from the presentation remain…: Full video documentation and supplementary reading materials from the presentation remain accessible on YouTube for technical review.
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
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