Bragging about token usage is like bragging about LoC written.
So if AI screws something up and re-writes it and then screws it up again, needing another re-write, that counted as more positive than if it was done correctly, and simply, the first time.
It’s more like bragging about compiler cycles spent.
I'm confused how anyone could believe it isn't an enhancer, unless they have refused to use any of the technologies.
Moving faster doesn’t necessarily mean delivering business value faster. You may be moving faster in the wrong direction.
More code doesn’t necessarily mean delivering more business value. You’re piling on debt and if that debt is growing faster than the value of the code, you’re actually losing.
And even if you somehow are delivering more, better code, faster, and without building technical debt: writing code is somewhere around 1-5% of the actual work and time that it takes to deliver a software product. At least in all the places I’ve ever worked. You are optimizing the wrong thing.
I’m well aware of what you’re saying, but we are definitively moving faster in the correct direction. If this hasn’t been the case for where you’ve worked, my sympathies!
Notably, the product itself isn't really better for users. And almost everything else apart coding now takes the bigger percentage of time. So as devs we could either just fuck around and refactor endlessly, or chill out and "complete the sprint in 30% of time". It was known for a long time that churning out code is not the bottleneck.
Negative 2000 Lines of Code