Do inline AI suggestions cost users time?
Design it like this
Time suggestions to natural pauses, and make them quick to scan and to reject.
What the research says
Studying programmers using Copilot showed a big share of their time went into reviewing and verifying suggestions, not just typing faster. Suggestions shown at the wrong moment interrupt.
“We find that averaged across all users, the ‘verifying suggestion’ state takes up the most time at 22.4%”
Mozannar et al., 2022
Sources
- Reading Between the Lines: Modeling User Behavior and Costs in AI-Assisted Programming2022 · arXiv (CHI 2024) · Hussein Mozannar, Gagan Bansal, Adam Fourney, Eric Horvitz
“We find that averaged across all users, the ‘verifying suggestion’ state takes up the most time at 22.4%”
Results