Linear says AI isn't saving product teams time

Mike Belsito hosts Now Shipping, the weekly AI news show for product people, brought to you by the team at Mind the Product. This week's three stories cover a platform war breaking out over where the world's code lives, the first real fallout from AI content watermarking, and a set of behavioural numbers from Linear that quietly undercut the standard business case for AI adoption.

In this episode, we cover:
— Cursor launched Origin, a full GitHub competitor, on the same day GitHub suffered a six-hour worldwide outage with a 20% global failure rate.
—  Origin is deliberately interoperable with GitHub, which removes the switching cost that usually keeps frustrated teams on a platform.
—  Developer tooling is consolidating into a two-platform fight between Microsoft and SpaceX AI, which closed its $60bn acquisition of Cursor four days before the Origin launch.
—  Anthropic is now watermarking every response Claude generates, everywhere, in response to the EU AI Act's transparency code of practice.
—  The watermark uses SynthID Text, encoding a signature in low-stakes stylistic choices that survives light editing but not a full rewrite.
—  The backlash is loud but misdirected: other major model providers have signed the same code, so this is an infrastructure shift rather than a Claude-specific one.
—  Linear's first data report, drawn from over 127,000 paid users, shows AI adoption more than doubling in every function between January and June, with product managers climbing fastest.
—  AI now authors close to half of all issues created in Linear, up from fewer than one in a thousand two years ago.
—  Teams with a coding agent went from 21 pull requests a week to 65; teams without one moved from 8 to 10.
—  Planning time did not move at all, in any function, in a year when execution metrics rose everywhere else.
— Linear frames the result as a Jevons paradox: AI work landed as a new layer on top of existing work, and total time spent went up rather than down.

Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction 
(00:16) This week's stories 
(01:01) Cursor launches Origin 
(02:01) SpaceX AI's acquisition of Cursor 
(02:34) Interoperability and switching costs 
(03:04) A two-platform developer tools market 
(04:42) Anthropic starts watermarking Claude 
(05:15) What the EU AI Act requires 
(05:42) How the watermark works 
(06:35) The backlash 
(07:08) What it means for product builders 
(09:22) Linear's first data report 
(10:12) AI adoption across functions 
(10:37) AI-authored issues and pull requests 
(11:21) Planning time hasn't moved 
(12:30) Jevons paradox and rising workload 
(13:28) Wrap-up

Referenced:
Cursor: https://cursor.com
GitHub: https://github.com
Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com
SynthID Text (Google DeepMind): https://deepmind.google/technologies/synthid/
EU AI Act: https://artificialintelligenceact.eu
Linear: https://linear.app
Linear's first data report
Mind the Product: https://www.mindtheproduct.com
Vote for Mike's SXSW session: https://tinyurl.com/belcetosxssw