- Tue 07 April 2026
- responses
- Michiel Scholten
- Couch
- #communication, #dev, #link, #llm, #tech, #work
I have been having thoughts like this for quite a while now, but Andrew Murphy puts them into words way better than I've been doing.
It's Tuesday morning. Your VP of Engineering is standing in front of a slide deck, vibrating with the kind of excitement usually reserved for people who just discovered cryptocurrency in 2017. They've just come back from a conference. Or maybe a vendor dinner. Three glasses of pinot noir and a demo, and now they have news.
"We're rolling out AI coding assistants across every team. Early numbers show a 40% increase in code output. This is going to transform our velocity."
The room does that thing where half the people nod along and the other half develop a sudden interest in their laptops. Your staff engineer is doing that face. You know the face - it's the one where they're calculating whether to say something or just update their LinkedIn later.
Nobody asks the question that matters, which is: velocity toward what, exactly?
You likely have bottlenecks in your processes. The speed in which code is written is very probably not one of them. Think waiting for people, for decisions to be made, for code to finally be reviewed and approved. LLM-written or assisted code is not going to solve your issues shipping changes and functionality in a timely fashion.
Map your value stream. Literally follow a feature from idea to production. Write down every step. Write down how long each step takes. Write down how long things sit between steps. The gap between steps is where your cycle time lives. This will be depressing. Do it anyway. Bring snacks.
Measure cycle time, not output. If you're measuring lines of code, PRs merged, or "story points delivered" and not measuring how long it takes from commit to production to users using it, you're optimising for the wrong thing. You're counting widgets at station A and ignoring the pile on the floor. Stop it. I mean it.
I urge you to read the whole thing, it might be enlightening. Maybe even painfully so.
Fix the bottleneck. It's not the keyboard.
