Include full lifecycle cost
Account for review, integration, compute, licensing, retraining, incidents and long-term maintenance—not just initial token usage.
Software Economics.
Code-generation cost alone is not total development cost.
EVIDENCE FRAMEWORKREVISION-READYOPEN QUESTIONS
WHAT THIS FIELD EXAMINES
Productivity, costs, maintenance and organizational change. Our purpose is to establish the evidence and questions needed for rigorous coverage, not to imply that a proposed future is inevitable.
Different teams, different outcomes
Results depend on repository familiarity, task selection, review practices and how tools are integrated into teams.
Economic claims need units
We require denominators, measurement intervals and disclosed assumptions before comparing total cost or productivity claims.
How we would test the claim.
Publish cost per accepted change and time-to-correctness, including uncertainty.
Documents to consult
These are starting references for future reporting, not proof that every open question above is resolved.
Revision record
Edition 1.0 · 9 October 2026. Initial scope and source register created. This brief is a research framework, not a completed investigation; material future corrections should be described rather than silently overwritten.
How corrections are documented ↗