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Simon Obstbaum
The 20% Truth: AI’s Real Impact on Developer Productivity
Simon Obstbaum is the former CTO of Crunchyroll and a Stanford researcher focused on software engineering productivity. At Crunchyroll, he led the engineering team through rapid subscriber and team growth while transitioning from a data center monolith to a microservice-based cloud architecture. He originally founded YOPESO in 2005, growing it to hundreds of engineers across the US, Europe, and Asia.
In this episode
Everyone says AI will 10x your dev team. But what does the data actually say?
In this episode of Fractional, Simon Obstbaum walks us through one of the most grounded conversations on developer productivity with AI you’ll hear.
Simon’s team at Stanford built a model trained on expert code reviews to study the actual impact of AI coding tools. What they found: a 20% productivity uplift at best—with wide variance depending on language, codebase complexity, and context.
We discuss:
• What productivity really means in software engineering
• Why legacy codebases often get worse with AI
• How LLMs quietly replace pair programming for junior devs
• What makes engineering teams more effective in reality—not theory
• Lessons from building Crunchyroll’s global tech org
This isn’t an AI hypefest. It’s a reality check.
Outline & Transcript
