How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren

Nicole Forsgren frames the conversation as a question of developer experience rather than code output. AI can accelerate typing, but broken builds, unreliable tools and new review bottlenecks may prevent a comparable improvement in team delivery. She describes DevEx as the everyday friction, workflows and support involved in building software, and argues that a team can increase output in ways that create toil, cognitive overload and eventual burnout. Flow, cognitive load and feedback loops therefore reinforce one another: AI-driven agent workflows can interrupt flow when developers repeatedly prompt and review, yet carefully designed tool chains can move flow to higher-level planning, delegation and system evaluation.