Measuring the impact of AI on experienced open-source developer productivity

N = 16 developers. Is this enough to draw any meaningful conclusions?

That depends on the size of the effect you’re trying to measure. If cursor provides a 5x, 10x, or 100x productivity boost as many people are claiming, you’d expect to see that in a sample size of 16 unless there’s something seriously wrong with your sample selection.

If you are looking for a 0.1% increase in productivity, then 16 is too small.

Well it depends on the variance of the random variable itself. You're right that with big, obvious effects, a larger n is less "necessary". I could see individuals having very different "productivities", especially when the idea is flattened down to completion time.