Two convergent reports landed in the same week with the same conclusion. Bain & Company published survey findings on June 1 reporting that corporate AI investments are based on cost savings that haven't arrived. The consultancy told its own clients the situation "should be making executives uncomfortable." The same week, developer telemetry firm Faros published a study of 22,000 developers and 4,000 teams measuring what LLM-assisted coding actually does to operational metrics. The numbers: lead time for changes up nearly five-fold. Deployment frequency down eleven percent. Defect rates up fifty percent. System throughput, calculated via Little's Law, down somewhere between seventy and eighty percent.

The consultancy that sold the savings model is telling clients to worry. The measurement firm is telling engineers what they already suspe ...