Engineering Health and Productivity

"It's really hard to measure productivity. So, I do ask people to ask their managers, "Would you rather give everyone on the team very expensive coding agent subscriptions or you get an extra head count?" Almost every one, the managers will say head count."

"We find engineering teams that are very, very AI forward are reporting about eight to 10 hours save per week. Whenever I hear a stat like this, I think an important element is this is the worst it will ever be. This is now the baseline."

"We have a Delete Code Club. We can always almost find a million-plus lines of code to delete, which is insane."

"I actually think as a startup your job is to take on technical debt because that is how you operate faster than a bigger company. Bigger companies don't take contact technical debt, they pay it usually right away, or they're paying back technical debt from the days when they were a startup."

"The user of the AI tools to develop software needs to form a different thinking. You need to start figuring out how are you using these AI tools to help you be successful. And it's no longer just the actual code writing, it's really evolving your thinking to the big picture, to the connected experience, to connected systems."

"They're writing code based on our surveys 55% faster. Imagine that you can give a software developer even few minutes, half an hour back in every given day, how much more productive they're becoming, and also as a result, how much happier they're becoming."

"We really rapidly became bottlenecked on other things like our merge queue. We had to completely re-architect it because so much more code was being written and so many more pull requests were being submitted. Over half of our pull requests are Claude Code generated."

"So productivity, I think, is basically how much we can get done and how much we can do over time. And I think that's why it's so important to have this holistic measure because we can't just brute force it, right. And so that's why when my team and a bunch of my peers study productivity, we include this community effect because software is a team sport."

"And then it's also kind of multiplying your team and multiplying your team's knowledge base because Devin really accumulates a lot of the knowledge from working with every member of your team and is able to bring that into each new session."

"100% of our PRs are reviewed by Codex daily as well. So basically any code that goes into production that's merged in, Codex kind of has its eyes on and suggests improvements, suggests changes in the PRs."