An engineering manager split their team by performance level and gave half access to Cursor, an AI coding assistant. Top performers got the biggest productivity boost, average performers saw less, and struggling engineers saw almost none. The gap widened because better engineers knew how to push the tool harder.
Chapters
People do tell me that they notice different buckets of employees, like different reactions to AI assisted tools. One of the people tell me, okay, amongst all his engineers, he thinks it's like senior engineers would get the most output. So he actually divided his team to three buckets. Best performing, average performing and lowest performing. But he didn't tell them, obviously. So, like they give half of each group access to like cursor. And then he was noticed the highest performing engineer get the biggest boost out of it. And the second group is the average performing. So his opinion is the highest performing engineers is more proactive. They say no how to solve problem. So AI helps them solve problem better. Whereas the people who are having lowest performing, they don't care much about work. Right. So it's easier to go on autopilot. The audience don't know how to do it.