Measuring productivity of developers isn’t really in line with what needs to happen, either. A team can be incredibly productive and still generate negative 100% ROI if what they are building so industriously is stuff that nobody wants to buy.

Which reflects another thing I’ve seen at work. A lot of what AI coding has enabled is diving headfirst into quagmires. Our costs have spiked - not just because of the token spend, also because we gotta pay the cloud platform to run all these new services, operators to operate them, marketers to market them, etc. - but revenue hasn’t budged.

But at least pre AI, most managers presumably subjectively measured devs on relevant performance. Using systems where employees who burn the most tokens ($) per week ‘win’ is crazy - just ask the AI to spin up a subagents to implement every conceivable approach to a task, then spin up n agent judge to pick the winner, and repeat. You've immediately got 50x or whatever your previous usage from that alone.