One old dragon that's reared its head again in this "age of AI" is the very wrongheaded notion that productivity == code. Managers aim to maximise the amount of code their dev teams produce, and so they maximise the time devs spend writing code. Let me tell you a story about the value of code.…

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Productivity in software development isn't measured by lines of code written, but by the value created. A personal story illustrates how spending a day visiting a retail store to understand a Point of Sale system resulted in changing just three lines of code—but those three lines prevented costly errors across 250 branches. Real productivity happens during the learning feedback loop: observing users, asking questions, and validating assumptions before coding. Writing code without understanding the problem compounds mistakes. The most valuable work often happens away from the keyboard, exploring the problem space and talking to stakeholders.

Coding Is When We’re Least Productive