Productivity Jam

With the rise of assisted programming, I keep hearing a recurring concern: increasing typing speed doesn't necessarily improve software development as a whole. In fact, it might even make things worse in the medium to long term.

This counterintuitive idea reminds me of the Braess paradox. In theory, building more highways or adding lanes should improve traffic. In practice, it often has the opposite effect. Why? Because those new lanes attract more drivers—people reorganize their lives around the promise of faster routes. They use their cars more. They move farther away. Demand increases, and with it, congestion. What seemed like an improvement turns into a trap.

My city is a perfect case study. Many upper-middle-class families move to the suburbs or nearby towns, drawn by the appeal of larger or more prestigious homes. But they continue working in the city and sending their kids to private schools located in affluent neighborhoods. These schools are in narrow hard to access streets, creating daily traffic bottlenecks on the highway. What looked like progress ends up generating a much bigger problem.

In software, the bottlenecks aren’t in how fast we write code. They’re in everything that comes after: reviewing code, integrating it, maintaining it, planning systems, understanding complexity. These activities don’t benefit from faster typing; they depend on our ability to think, communicate, and collaborate.

So if we only accelerate the act of writing without improving the rest of the process, we’ll end up with lower overall productivity, degraded quality—or both.

Maybe the point isn't about increasing productivity at all costs, but about redefining what productivity means. Going faster isn’t always moving forward. Sometimes it just brings us to the next traffic jam sooner.

We need a pace that keeps us in control. That allows us to understand what we’re building. To develop intuition. To make informed decisions. And perhaps, we need to revisit our goals: if the point is not to arrive faster, but to keep moving, then it makes sense to do it as sustainably as possible.

"Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast."

Navy SEAL proverb

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