The Productivity-Experience Paradox

This is the second post in a series I’m writing about the most interesting findings from my Masters research on the impact of AI on software engineering, as well as some of the thoughts I’ve had since. This one is about how AI made engineers feel more productive, and why that productivity might be masking something we should care about. The first post, The Middle Loop, focused on my first research question - where engineers spend their time and focus when they use AI to build software. The short answer is less time on most core development tasks, especially writing code, and slightly more time reviewing. The longer answer includes evidence of a new category of work, supervisory engineering work, sitting neatly between the inner and outer loops of software development. This post is more about how that shift feels, which was the focus of my second research question - how does the use of AI coding assistants impact software engineers’ perceptions of their developer experience and…