Research Scientist, Stanford AI Lab / Co‑Founder, P10Y

I study how AI is changing knowledge work.

AI is doing to knowledge work what machines once did to muscle, compressed from generations into years. The comforting story is that we will all just move up a level of abstraction. I study whether that story is true.

Yegor Denisov-Blanch, Research Scientist at the Stanford AI Lab.

Founder, operator, athlete, researcher

My Path

I left school at 14 and figured the rest out as I went. Each step made the next one possible.

Age 14-18

Built a B2B e-commerce business in Spain and grew it to $500K in revenue.

Nobody takes a 14-year-old seriously on a call, so I taught myself how to code and sold online before e-commerce was a thing.

2011

Enrolled directly into college, skipping 5 grades.

Skipped high school, scored well on the SAT, and learned via Khan Academy.

2016

Graduated Top 1% from Indiana University's Kelley School of Business.

Studied Operations Research: optimization, stochastic systems, queues & simulation. The math of making systems run better.

2017–2022

Rose to Chief of Staff to DHL's CEO for Europe, the Middle East & Africa.

Led transformation work touching 2,500 employees across 25+ countries. Running logistics during COVID was a peak life experience.

2025-Now

Co-founded P10Y, a company that measures AI's impact on software engineers.

Built on my research, deployed across dozens of enterprises, including all of Salesforce and part of a FAANG company.

Other cool stuff

Awards

  • DHL Employee of the Year Nomination1 of 6 nominees out of 40,000 employees
  • Master of Sport of RussiaNational Champion equivalent. Awarded in 2013 for Olympic weightlifting

Geography

  • Fluent in 4 languagesRussian, Spanish, English, and Catalan.
  • Lived in 6 countriesWhether I liked living somewhere mostly came down to whether I liked the food.

Courses I Enjoyed

  • CS329ASelf-Improving AI Agents
  • CS349DCompound AI Systems
  • CS329TTrustworthy Machine Learning
  • CS525Training Data for AI
  • PSYC 233Awareness and Stress
  • STRAMGT 514Product Market Fit

Deep dive

Ghost engineers

I studied private Git data from more than 50,000 engineers across hundreds of companies. About 9.5% did almost no measurable work, less than one tenth as much as a typical engineer.

9.5%engineers who do virtually nothing
50,000+engineers analyzed, across 100s of companies
14% vs 6%ghosts when fully-remote vs in-office

The estimate doesn't come from counting commits. A model scores every commit the way a panel of ten expert reviewers would: how hard was the work, how maintainable is it, how much value does it add. Counting commits only catches people who do nothing. Scoring the work catches people who commit a lot of nothing.

The finding made the cover of the Washington Post's Business section, sparked a global debate about remote work and measurement, and was amplified by Elon Musk. The strongest validation came from the companies themselves: when they checked the engineers we flagged, the ghosts were real.

Ghost engineers

Deep dive

AI & developer productivity

I measure what AI does to software output across 100,000 developers at hundreds of companies. For most of the AI boom the answer held: gains that are real, below the sales pitch, and uneven across tasks and teams. In December 2025 the answer started to change.

~100kdevelopers measured
Modestaverage lift through 2025, below the hype
Dec 2025inflection point in the data

The same expert-panel model scores every commit on time, quality, maintainability, and complexity, then tracks output as teams adopt AI. Through 2025 the average lift stayed smaller than the headlines, and it depended on the task, the age of the codebase, and how common the language was.

Most companies can't tell whether their AI investment pays off, because their metrics can't see it. That measurement gap, and the distance between teams that master AI and teams that don't, is the throughline of the work.

December 2025 marked an inflection in the data. Through the peak of the hype I kept saying we weren't there yet, and the numbers backed me up. I was right about the call and wrong about the clock: the shift arrived long before I expected it.

AI & developer productivity

The AI-productivity work is now cited and discussed across institutional, enterprise, investor, podcast, and engineering-leadership channels.

17 papers

Publications

2026
Repository AI Configuration Is Associated with Three-Fold Differences in Code Quality After Agent Adoption

Introduces RAMP, a way to score how ready repositories are for coding agents, and links stronger setup with fewer quality problems after adoption.

ASE 2026AI & Work Performance
2026
The Properties and Pathologies of V-Information

Revisits V-information and shows it can behave strangely under realistic modeling limits, making it risky to treat as a simple information measure.

Working paperAI Measurement & Evaluation
2026
Propagating Evaluation Failures in Awarded Papers on Language Model Sampling

Tracks how weak sampling evaluations passed through major papers, turning shaky claims into later assumptions that other work built on.

Working paperAI Measurement & Evaluation
2026
The Artificial Hivemind That Wasn't

Rechecks claims that LLM answers collapse into one narrow style, and finds much more diversity across topics, models, and prompts.

Working paperModel Behavior & Data
2026
VeriBench-DT: Trustworthy Agentic Autoformalization with Original-Code Verification via Differential Testing

Tests whether an agent's Lean proof actually matches the original Python code, exposing proofs that are correct but about the wrong thing.

BenchmarkAgents & Verification
2026
Predictive AI Evaluation Competition

Proposes a competition where researchers predict evaluation results before they are run, making AI benchmarks harder to game after the fact.

NeurIPS 2026AI Measurement & Evaluation

Authored writing

Policy analysis and columns on AI, productivity, language, and remote work for public audiences.

2025
Policy analysisPermanent Mission of Kazakhstan to the United NationsUN / Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan: Central Asia's AI Powerhouse

Strategic AI policy analysis commissioned for Kazakhstan's official diplomatic channel at the United Nations.

2025
ColumnThe Astana TimesKazakhstan
Kazakhstan: Central Asia's AI Powerhouse

A public case for Kazakhstan's AI opportunity, grounded in productivity data from nearly 100,000 developers across 500+ companies.

2025
ColumnTengri NewsKazakhstan
Kazakhstan Becomes Central Asian Leader in AI Race

Russian-language column on how Kazakhstan can keep its emerging lead in AI-driven software productivity.

2025
ColumnEl Confidencial / TeknautasSpain
I have spent years analyzing productivity in Silicon Valley

Spanish-language analysis of AI, ghost workers, and the changing productivity model in Silicon Valley.

2025
ColumnEl Español / InvertiaSpain
Artificial intelligence speaks English, not Spanish

Argument that AI's English-language bias creates a structural productivity disadvantage for Spanish-speaking economies.

2025
ColumnEl DebateSpain
Ghost workers: 9.3% of remote workers in Spain do nothing or almost nothing

Spanish op-ed on remote work, ghost workers, and why better measurement should protect merit rather than become surveillance.

2025
Columnmoney.plPoland
They gain a lot from AI. But are they tripping over their own feet?

Polish business op-ed on AI productivity gains, rework, language effects, and what local firms need to get right.

2025
ColumnInfor.plPoland
Believe in the ghost: what do programmers really do when working remotely?

Polish-language piece explaining ghost engineers, remote-work structure, and data-driven productivity measurement.

Proof

Media & Talks

Used in policy by the World Bank and the United Nations, covered by 100+ outlets worldwide, and presented at major AI conferences.

Media

Talks & events

Teaching

Stanford Computer Science · Spring 2026

CS321M: AI Measurement Science

A graduate course on how to measure AI systems when benchmarks saturate and evaluation methods disagree. Students learn to treat evaluation as a measurement problem, then build a new measurement approach of their own.

19Lectures
45+Readings
6Textbook chapters
5Guest lectures

Guest lectures from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Harvard, MIT & Transluce

Off the clock

Interests

Yegor seated in a gym with chalk and weightlifting plates nearbyYegor seated on a red Kawasaki motorcycle by Stanford Graduate School of Business

Lifting things

I've logged 5,000+ workouts and lifted 100+ million kg, about 10 Eiffel Towers' worth of weight.

Automating things

At 13, I started coding video game bots. Watching them play was more fun.

Pushing limits

I enjoy doing side quests in human firmware.

Driving things

I enjoy driving things with engines at fast speeds.

Contact

Get in touch

If you study how work is changing, build in this space, or want to, get in touch.