Why aren't we shipping faster now?

Talk · UC Irvine software engineering seminar · October 30, 2026 Why aren’t we shipping faster now? AI, activity, and outcomes in software engineering Christian Bird, Dryden Technology Group 21 minutes, with captions. Also on YouTube . Slides Handout 19 pages, 3.8 MB One page per picture. The version to read. Full deck 41 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