How to spend your AI productivity dividend

I recently learned about a term for the extra time/efficiency you gain from automation: a productivity dividend. While the dust hasn’t settled on just how much more productive using coding agents makes engineers, it’s clear that at least for producing, investigating, and optimizing code, the dividend is nonzero. A natural question is where to spend it. The most obvious way to spend the dividend is to ship more. You can view vibe coding through this lens: if you use a coding agent and it reduces your time to produce a feature by X%, vibe coding is when you take all of that X% and apply it to adding another feature to your project. Using some of your dividend to ship additional features is reasonable, but there are other ways to use the time that might help you move even faster and more confidently in the long run. Here’s a collection of other ways to reinvest your productivity dividend: Understanding. Prior to agentic coding, one of the engineers on our team was entirely dedicated to…