---
title: "The productivity impact of coding agents"
description: "The study examines how developers use Cursor’s agent and how its adoption affects software productivity across tens of thousands of users. After the agent became the default for eligible organizations, the rate of merged pull requests increased 39% relative to time trends in a baseline group, while revert rates did not change significantly, bugfix rates slightly decreased, and average lines edited and files touched per merged pull request were unchanged. Agent acceptance varied with experience: each standard-deviation increase in years of experience corresponded to an approximately 6% increase in acceptance relative to the mean, and experienced developers were more likely to plan before coding. In a sample of 1,000 users, about 61% of conversation-starting requests concerned implementation, with others focused on explanation or planning. The authors say no single metric yet captures AI’s economic impact on software engineering."
---

# The productivity impact of coding agents

[Cursor](https://yomu.fyi/company/cursor) · Oskar Schulz · Nov 11, 2025

**Type:** Benchmark

## Summary

The study examines how developers use Cursor’s agent and how its adoption affects software productivity across tens of thousands of users. After the agent became the default for eligible organizations, the rate of merged pull requests increased 39% relative to time trends in a baseline group, while revert rates did not change significantly, bugfix rates slightly decreased, and average lines edited and files touched per merged pull request were unchanged. Agent acceptance varied with experience: each standard-deviation increase in years of experience corresponded to an approximately 6% increase in acceptance relative to the mean, and experienced developers were more likely to plan before coding. In a sample of 1,000 users, about 61% of conversation-starting requests concerned implementation, with others focused on explanation or planning. The authors say no single metric yet captures AI’s economic impact on software engineering.

## Context

The study addresses open questions about how developers use Cursor’s agent and the effect of making it the default mode on organizational productivity, throughput, and quality.

## Approach / What changed

Researchers compared organizations already using Cursor before the agent’s release with a baseline group that was not using Cursor during the analysis period, examining merged pull requests, reverts, bugfixes, code changes, and user request patterns.

## Takeaways

- Organizations using Cursor before the agent’s release merged 39% more pull requests after the agent became the default relative to time trends in the baseline group.
- For every standard-deviation increase in years of experience, agent-code acceptance increased by approximately 6% relative to the mean.
- About 61% of conversation-starting requests in a 1,000-user sample involved implementation; experienced developers were more likely to plan before generating code.

**Tags:** [AI Agents](https://yomu.fyi/topic/ai-agents), [Cursor](https://yomu.fyi/topic/cursor), [Productivity](https://yomu.fyi/topic/productivity)

- Source: [Cursor](https://cursor.com/blog/productivity)
- Source URL: https://cursor.com/blog/productivity
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-09-02T11:45:13.031Z

[Read original post](https://cursor.com/blog/productivity)