The AI productivity trap: Why your best engineers are getting slower

TLDR

This article discusses the AI productivity trap, where experienced engineers are becoming slower due to the deployment of AI copilots in their workflows. The author, Chengyu (Cay) Zhang, argues that AI tools are currently making experienced developers slower for complex, high-stakes engineering tasks. The core of the problem is that AI is really good at being almost right, leading to subtle logical flaws or edge-case failures that aren't immediately obvious. To escape the productivity trap, the author suggests a shift from AI-assisted coding to AI-enabled architecture, where senior engineers focus on building robust systems that can handle the chaos of AI-generated code.

The AI gives you a dopamine hit. Text appears on the screen at superhuman speed and the blank page problem vanishes. But the engineer’s role has shifted from being a creator to being a reviewer and that is where the trap snaps shut.