I worked with a journalist who covered tech in the 80s & 90s and she remembered that studies then didn't show improvements in productivity with the adoption of computers, despite people feeling as though they were more productive.

Reminds me of this Jeff Bezos quote:

"The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it."

There is no comparison of the complexity, or depth of those PRs with work previously done without agents. The authors themselves acknowledge that PR count rewards small, frequent PRs and that whether the additional output justifies its cost remains unanswered. We do not know whether end-to-end feature delivery became faster, whether the additional output justified the cost, or what happened to defects, maintainability, review effort, and rework.

The conclusion seems to be little more than: Microsoft engineers are using AI tools, Microsoft is spending more on AI usage, and AI vendors are earning more subscription and token revenue.

More PRs are not necessarily more value. Without quality, delivery-time, and ROI metrics, the claimed productivity gain is largely meaningless.

And that is based on the pricing that they sell a dollar for less than a dollar so the costs may be much much more.