Developer Productivity

The Observation I recently watched a new graduate join a team. Fresh out of school. Zero real-world experience. Zero familiarity with the codebase or tech stack. That’s typical—every new hire starts there. What wasn’t typical: he went from “where is the repo?” to helping the team with non-trivial tasks in just a couple of weeks. Not months. Weeks. What Changed Twenty years ago, ramping up in a complex codebase with an unfamiliar tech stack took a minimum of a couple of months to become fully productive. That was normal. Nobody expected you to be fully functional in weeks. ...

Most developers ask AI tools to write a function or fix a bug. That’s fine, but here’s the cheat code I discovered: treat AI like a developer on your team. When I do that, everything changes. The Pattern I Discovered I use AI tools every day in my professional work and personal projects. Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini; I subscribe to all of them. Over time, I’ve noticed a pattern. These tools excel at zooming in. By that, I mean they’re excellent at specific tasks: generating code, writing tests, refactoring functions, etc… . We all know this. ...