A Lesson From the Cockpit

The tech industry has declared that AI will increase developer productivity. Task-level productivity feels obvious, though concrete evidence is elusive — for example, METR reported a widely cited result: a 19% decline in productivity with AI, but eight months later, they had to drop the survey as developers increasingly refused to participate without AI tools. “Claude is down” is now like “Github is down.” Productivity metrics may also sound hollow due to a gap between measured productivity and developers’ perceptions of it. I don’t think we understand this enough yet. End-to-end productivity is anything but clear in brownfield situations — most money-making software companies are brownfields with real customers, real data, and code evolved over years. In brownfields, most technical discovery and decision-making is done via Slack or Zoom meetings, where people need to talk to each other to piece together facts from tribal knowledge. It is yet unclear how to deal with brownfield…