Productivity is up, but is your time worth more?

This chart shows what everyone has been asking to see for almost four years.

Coding productivity is exploding.

📈 More websites. 📈 More apps. 📈 More GitHub commits than ever.

This isn’t a new story for modern society; but it’s now impacting the software industry.

Consider automation in the airline industry.

In the 1950s, cockpits had five crew: captain, first officer, flight engineer, navigator, radio operator.

Autopilot didn’t necessarily replace pilots. It eliminated roles.

• Satellite navigation killed the navigator.
• Automated radios killed the radio operator.
• Fly-by-wire killed the flight engineer.

By 1989, the 747-400 flew with two pilots.

Now Airbus is testing single-pilot operations.

The industry is excited it could save $15B/year by removing one more human from the cockpit.

Consider the pilots who remained? Their pay cratered. In 1978, senior captains earned the equivalent of $500K+ with pensions.

Today, median is $138K—and early-career pilots earn far less.

Productivity went up. Headcount went down.

The humans who stayed got commoditized.

Now it’s software’s turn.

AI won’t eliminate developers. It will reduce headcount per project and put downward pressure on the roles that remain.

Unless we do something different.

🪤 Here’s the trap (don’t become an operator):

If you’re shipping AI-generated code without keeping up your mental model of the system, you’re not becoming more strategic. You’re becoming a replaceable operator.

You can’t make architecture decisions about systems you don’t understand.

You can’t see around corners for the business if you don’t operate on the system architecture in your mind.

The question isn’t “how much code can we produce?

It’s “are we using AI to make human judgment more valuable?

The metric I care about: leverage on human time.

Are engineers spending more time on architecture, product decisions, problems worth solving? Or are they becoming the last human in an increasingly automated cockpit — waiting to be optimized out?

So, it’s abundantly clear “productivity” is up.

The real question is whether an hour of your time is worth more today than it was yesterday.