Developers who move from a traditional IDE to an AI-native one often say the same thing: it just feels faster. That is not marketing. Studies now measure the effect in controlled trials, and the difference is significant.
But the felt-speed of these tools is fragile. It depends on suggestions arriving within a few hundred milliseconds of the trigger. When a suggestion lands in 200 ms, your brain treats it as an extension of your own typing. When it lands in 900 ms, your brain has moved on and the suggestion is now an interruption. That gap is almost entirely a function of your internet connection to the model provider.
This is why serious developers pay attention to their home connection now in a way they did not five years ago. A gigabit fiber plan is not vanity — it is the difference between an AI assistant that augments your flow and one that fights it. If you want to see the actual research on how much AI tools accelerate real coding work, the peer-reviewed enterprise study on AI coding tools and developer speed is a solid primary source.
