Speed at the Cost of Quality: How Cursor AI Increases Short-Term Velocity and Long-Term Complexity in Open-Source Projects
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the promise to revolutionize the field of software engineering. Among other things, LLM agents are rapidly gaining momentum in software development, with practitioners reporting a multifold increase in productivity after adoption. Yet, empirical evidence is lacking around these claims. In this paper, we estimate the causal effect of adopting a wide…