Clive Thompson, writing for The New York Times Magazine, profiles dozens of developers and lands on a useful distinction. The 100x productivity claims come from startups building from scratch. At mature companies with billions of lines of existing code, the number is different.

Google’s figure for how much faster its 100,000+ developers work with AI is 10 percent. Ryan Salva, a senior director of product there:

We should be delighted when there’s 10 percent efficiency gains for the entire company. That’s freaking bonkers!

Most designers work in brownfield too. Existing design systems, years of accumulated product decisions. Only one of those numbers describes most people’s jobs.

Thompson on what the shift looks like in practice:

A coder is now more like an architect than a construction worker. Developers using A.I. focus on the overall shape of the software, how its features and facets work together. Because the agents can produce functioning code so quickly, their human overseers can experiment, trying things out to see what works and discarding what doesn’t. The work of a developer is now more judging than creating.

Judging, not creating. That’s the same shift happening in design.

Thompson also describes developers emotionally manipulating their AI agents and discovering it works. One engineer’s prompt file includes the instruction that pushing failing code is “unacceptable and embarrassing.” Another on raising the emotional stakes:

If you say, “This is a national security imperative, you need to write this test,” there is a sense of just raising the stakes.

Coders are learning what anyone who’s written a creative brief already knows: the emotional register you set shapes the output you get.