The AI Tools That Save Your Time — And The Ones Stealing It

Everyone assumes AI tools save time. A 2025 randomized study put that to the stopwatch — and found experienced developers were 19% SLOWER with AI, while feeling 20% faster. This is the science of which AI tools actually give you time back, and which quietly steal it — plus a simple three-question test to tell them apart. Chapters: 0:00 The stopwatch test 1:08 What saving time really means 2:04 Workslop: the tax you hand to someone else 3:00 The quiet cost of switching 4:01 Where AI genuinely wins 5:04 The three-question test 5:49 The real measure Sources: METR (arXiv:2507.09089, 2025) · Leroy, "attention residue" (2009) · Mark et al., interrupted work (2005) · "AI-Generated Workslop", HBR (2025) · Brynjolfsson, Li & Raymond, Generative AI at Work (NBER, 2023). #AI #productivity #aitools