AI hasn't made engineering productivity unmeasurable. It's made the easy metrics dangerous, inflating commits and lines of code automatically, widening the gap between feeling fast and being fast, and hiding real costs downstream. Here's what breaks, why, and what to measure instead.
Tech debt is a hidden tax on engineering, quietly consuming 25–40% of developer capacity. Traditional approaches can't keep up. AI doesn't make tech debt disappear, but it changes the economics of managing it, turning a reactive chore into a measurable, strategic advantage for organizations.
Technical debt has become one of the most pressing challenges in modern software development. Recent surveys across 200 technology companies reveal a startling statistic: developers spend between 25-40% of their time addressing
