Morning Edition · Thursday, October 29, 2026Published at 2:14 AM EDT · New York

New paper argues AI "time saved" must be counted against the errors it creates, as developers credit Claude Opus 5.5 with a jump in quality

The essay separates stopwatch time from a counterfactual ledger, just as Simon Willison reports that Opus 5.5 builds games that are actually fun and a Russian developer channel declares the old software industry finished.

A new paper on arXiv, "Counting the Bandages: On measuring the time that AI saves," compares two ways to measure AI's productivity effect. In the "stopwatch view," time saved is whatever the clock records. In the "ledger view," time saved i…