DX

DX publishes the Engineering Enablement newsletter and the AI Where It Matters studies, and sells a platform for developer experience metrics. Its researchers keep returning to one argument: industry-wide averages on AI productivity hide what happens inside any single company.

Justin Reock, Deputy CTO, put numbers to that on 23 November 2025. Aggregate figures show mild gains; granular per-company data shows extreme volatility, with some organizations watching change failure rate climb while developer confidence collapses. Reock holds that 95% of productivity comes from the system surrounding a developer, and invokes Goldratt's theory of constraints: an hour saved on a task that is not the bottleneck is an hour wasted.

Brian Houck's 5 August 2026 newsletter, "What are code reviews even for?", applies the same lens to the review queue. At Meta, significant lines per human-merged diff rose 106% in a year and diffs per developer per month rose 51%, with over 80% of that growth coming from agentic AI. DX measures median pull request size up 64%. Developers want to spend around 7% of their time reviewing. Houck's move is to ask what review was for before AI, citing Bacchelli and Bird (ICSE 2013): defect-related remarks were 14% of the comments developers actually wrote.

Laura Tacho, CTO, co-wrote the Pragmatic Engineer study of 18 companies with Gergely Orosz: 85% of engineers use AI tools, and many engineering leaders still cannot establish what that is worth.