Coders are refusing to work without AI — and that could come back to bite them

In 2026, you cannot pry AI coding tools out of developers’ vise grip, researchers have discovered. But while AI is undoubtedly helping coders produce code faster, it may not be producing better code, other researchers warn. And that could cause problems down the road for them.  Specifically, in February 2026, respected AI research lab METR published a surprising revelation: Most developers won’t work, even on a limited number of tasks, without AI anymore. METR had hoped to provide an update to some groundbreaking research published a few months earlier, in 2025, on AI coding productivity. In it, researchers measured how much time open source developers took to do tasks by hand versus with AI. While developers in that study reported that AI was making them more productive, they were shocked to learn it actually slowed them down. Sure, it generated code faster, but then they spent extra time finding and fixing errors, steering the AI and waiting on it to complete tasks.  When METR set out to repeat the experiment to measure advances in AI and coder proficiency, they couldn’t. Devs weren’t willing to participate “because they do not wish to work without AI” even just for the study, the researchers confessed.  Instead, METR published a survey in May that allowed technical employees to self-report their AI productivity gains. Not surprisingly, they perceived that AI made them twice as valuable to their organizations. But recent headlines about the wild expense of so-called tokenmaxxing , coupled with a smattering of recent research, make such self-perceptions dubious. Tokenmaxxing, or using the number of tokens a person uses as a proxy for productivity with AI, has been the trend of 2026 so far. And it may already be over.  Amazon shut down its internal token-tracking leaderboard called Kirorank after employees were gaming it by using AI agents excessively, and running up costs, the Financial Times reported this week. The