Measuring the subscription

The best engineers I've ever known wrote less code, not more. They deleted things. They simplified. They understood that the goal was never the code itself. They solved problems, they made the system reliable, and they served the user. Measuring developers by output volume, whether that's lines, commits, or tokens, mistakes the exhaust for the engine.

Every era of tooling brings a new class of metric that mistakes activity for value. The spreadsheet didn't make accountants more productive just because they could fill more cells. AI won't make developers more productive just because it can generate more code.

We aren't even tracking if the right problems are being solved, and solved well. If the productivity dashboard can't answer that, it's not measuring productivity. It's measuring the subscription.

Source: iDiallo