Larridin CTO Ameya Kanitkar has a nuanced view on developer productivity in the AI era, and it’s prominently featured in an article in The New Stack.
AI coding agents have turned every software engineer into something new — and, according to a recent piece in The New Stack, it's not what you'd expect. LaunchDarkly CTO Cameron Etezadi puts it bluntly, referring to the individual contributor (IC) role: "There is no more IC role anymore. Every IC engineer is really a front-line manager now, even fresh out of school."
Three key takeaways:
1. More code may not be more productivity
As Daniel Wang, CTO of Citizen Health and formerly of Uber, puts it: "Software exists to solve problems. If AI lets us ship 10x as much code but customer outcomes don't improve, we aren't more productive." The signals that matter, he argues, are cycle time from idea to production, rollback rate, escaped defects, and reliability, not raw output.
2. Most companies are still measuring the wrong things
So what are companies actually tracking? Kanitkar told The New Stack that it's largely tangible, but irrelevant activity:
"Some version of lines of code, PRs merged, or velocity points; the same metrics teams used before AI showed up."
The problem isn't just that these metrics miss the point. It's that AI can inflate them effortlessly. Reward teams for code output and commit frequency, Kanitkar warns, and you may get exactly that: volume, but without any real increase in value, and with teams steered away from the customer outcomes that count.
3. The always-on agent economy is burning engineers out
Here's the paradox: engineers feel wildly productive and completely exhausted at the same time. Midjourney founder David Holz noticed it among his own friends. Kanitkar sees the mechanism up close:
"We also see engineers wanting to set agents loose overnight so the work is waiting for them in the morning, which sounds efficient, but it creates this constant background pressure to keep feeding the agents new work so they're never sitting idle. That pressure is draining."
The fatigue, Kanitkar argues, comes from the managerial side of the new job; the constant context-switching required to keep several agents fed and moving at once.
Gartner is predicting that 60% of organizations will shrink to "tiny teams" of as few as two or three engineers by 2029. With a shift like that, agent-babysitting may simply become the job.
The jury's still out
Feeling productive isn't the same as being productive, but most companies still have few reliable ways to tell the difference. That gap, between what AI makes possible and what organizations can actually measure, is the real story here.
The full article is worth your time. Read "Every IC engineer is really a front line manager now." But are they productive? at The New Stack.