Developer ramp-up time continues to accelerate with AI

This post was originally published in Engineering Enablement, DX’s newsletter dedicated to sharing research and perspectives on developer productivity. Subscribe to be notified when we publish new issues.

Onboarding new hires has always been an expensive and time-consuming process, and an area where AI has the opportunity to have a meaningful impact. In Q4 2025, when we looked at Time to 10th PR (a measure we use to track ramp-up time), we saw AI already having a dramatic effect. In some companies, Time to 10th PR was cut in half: from 91 days with no AI usage to 49 days with daily AI use.

We revisit this data quarterly. In our most recent analysis, we’re seeing that trend continue: onboarding time is faster today than it was in Q4 of last year.

For this latest cut, we analyzed data from a random sample of 400 companies during the period from October 2025 to February of 2026. We measured the average number of days between a developer’s start date and their 10th merged PR. We specifically looked at an aggregate of engineers who showed daily use of AI and compared how ramp-up time changed from October 2025 to February 2026.

The dataset includes large, global organizations with 500+ developers, spanning both tech and non‑tech companies.

As of April 2026, the current average Time to 10th PR across our dataset is 33 days, down from 39 days in Q4 2025. That represents a further ~15% decrease quarter-over-quarter, and more than a 50% reduction since Q1 2024, before AI usage was widespread. The change this quarter isn’t as dramatic as the 50% reduction we saw last year, but it is still meaningful. This trend begs the question: will onboarding times continue to fall, or are we approaching a natural floor where many of the remaining steps are not easily compressed by AI? As more agentic solutions are devised for onboarding processes, we may see this figure continue to decline.

Part of the improvement we’re seeing since last quarter comes from the fact that AI is no longer an optional, individual choice in many organizations. Developers are guided to use AI to ask questions about the codebase, to explain architectural decisions, and to propose draft changes that senior engineers can review. The result is that the “figuring things out” phase is shorter.

At the same time, Time to 10th PR is a narrow measure. It tells us how quickly someone reaches a specific milestone, but it does not, on its own, tell us about the quality of those changes, the amount of rework they generate, or the depth of understanding new hires have of the systems they’re touching. That will be something we explore more in future analyses.