AI dramatically increases velocity. But is velocity productivity? Productivity relative to which scope: you, the team, the department, the company?

The question is really, velocity _of what_?

I got this from a HN comment. It really hit for me because the default mentality for engineers is to build. The more you build the better. That's not "wrong" but in a business setting it is very much necessary but not sufficient. And so whenever we think about productivity, impact, velocity, whatever measure of output, the real question is _of what_? More code? More product surface area? That was never really the problem. In fact it makes life worse majority of the time.

The real question is, is it increasing their velocity?

They've already admitted they just 'throw the code away and start again'.

I think we've got another victim of perceived productivity gains vs actual productivity drop.

People sitting around watching Claude churn out poor code at a slower rate than if they just wrote it themselves.

Don't get me wrong, great for getting you started or writing a little prototype.

But the code is bad, riddled with subtle bugs and if you're not rewriting it and shoving large amounts of AI code into your codebase, good luck in 6-12 months time.