Every few weeks another engineering leader publishes their AI productivity manifesto. Most read like press releases. Darragh Curran, Intercom’s CTO, argued it isn’t about the tools:

If we were to literally hit pause on further advancements, I’m convinced any engineering team just leveraging the already existing tools effectively should expect at least double their current productivity – a 2x improvement. Yet most people and teams in the industry at large are not getting close to this today, they aren’t trying, and they probably don’t believe it’s possible, and even if they do, behavior change is hard and the forces or incentives aren’t clear yet.

(By the way, he wrote this in mid-2025. Given how much better the latest models are, I’m sure the number is higher now.)

The tools are good enough. The gap is behavioral. Engineers got good AI tooling early and had clear on-ramps. For designers, the tooling is fragmented and many in the profession are still debating whether AI belongs in the process at all.

Curran makes the economic case:

It’s worth noting this is an entirely different vector to “just hire more people”. Even if we allocated the budget to hire 2x as many people, at our scale, it’s highly improbable we’d double our team size in 12 months. Even if we did, that’d come at huge cost and tradeoffs, hiring and onboarding takes time and carries risk, so we’d be slower for a year or two hoping to then catch up.