AI scope creep & productivity

I was recently asked to look at a change one of our developers made to RavenDB. He was chasing a particularly slow query with spatial sorting (a “find me all the nearest Thai restaurants” style of query). He found the root cause and had a fix ready. The fix gave us a 25% improvement in query processing time, and the change was about 15 lines of code.A few years ago, I would have said: great job, merge it, ship it, let customers enjoy the faster queries. But I got a hunch that we could do something different. We asked the AI model to try it out. It took a non-trivial amount of work to even test that, while in the past, it would have taken a few days just to try it out. The model was able to complete the spike while we were talking about why this should be a good approach and the architectural-level aspects that were driving it. The result of that spike was an improvement of 12x. Not 12%. Twelve times faster. A 25% improvement is a wow;a 1,100% improvement is damn. In essence, we took a…