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Nicole Forsgren

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2025-10-19
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2025-10-19
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  1. “Honestly, I think the best thing you can do is go talk to people and listen. And I love that, you know, the audience of this podcast is primarily PMs because they tend to be really good at this. And I would say start with listening and not with tools and automation. So many times companies are like, well, I'm just going to build this tool or I'm going to build this thing. Often you build a thing that you yourself have had a challenge with or that is. If you just go talk to people and ask the developers like.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I hate to say return on investment, but like the business value is the opportunity here is huge, right? In general, we write software. Well, for fun and for hobbies, right? But we also have software because it meets a business need. It helps us with market share. It helps us attract and retain customers. It helps us do all of these things. And I think DevX is important because it enables Of that software creation, it enables all of that problem solving, it enables the super rapid experimentation with customers that before, you know, you'd need a while for a prototype and maybe a little bit longer to actually flight it through an AB test on a production system. Mean, you can do it in hours right now”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Now, the nature of writing code in systems itself is interrupt driven or full of interruptions at least, right? Because you start something and then it interjects. And so how do we think about that? Does that mean that a four hour work block is still useful? I mean, probably, but does that mean that now we can also make a 45 minute work block useful? Because getting into the flow is actually kind of handed off, at least in part to the machine or the machine can help with get back into the flow by reminding us of context and generating diagrams of the system and all the things. And so I think that's a really, really interesting area that's just ripe for questions and opportunity. And please folks do this research and come back to me because it might not make my list, but it's such a great question.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Okay, well, when we think about what it used to be like back in the olden days, three years ago, three and a half years ago, we could block off four hours of time and we could probably get two or three hours of really good work done. Now, because we were just focused, right? There were no interruptions, minimal interruptions.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Let's be micro dose. So, in the context of knowing we have about four hours of good deep work, and I'm sure many of us have probably hit this, right? We're like, we have good period, like maybe it's morning, maybe it's afternoon for folks, and then you hit a time where you're like, I'm going to clean up my inbox because that is all I can do right now, right? Like I can be functional, but I'm not going to come up with my best innovative problem solving authoring code writing work. Lot of times the way to do that and to get into it is to have these long chunks to get into flow and to get that deep work, right? It's usually, this is making, I'm like hand waving, right? Two hours at minimum, right? Like an hour can be tricky because it could take time to get into that state.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “And that's kind of the upper limit ish for the most part. And I'm sure people are going to be like, well, I am superhuman.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “So purely speculative. But for example, Gloria Mark has done some really good work on attention and deep work. And Cubans can get about four hours of good deep work a day. Like, that's about it.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I think it'll be interesting to see how that impacts the way we structure work moving forward. You know, we were talking about flow state and cognitive load. Now that our attention has to focus on things at certain times and it's broken up from how we used to do it, I think there's some real opportunity there to not just rethink workflows, but rethink how we structure our days and how we structure our work.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Versus talking to a senior engineer on the team. More isn't always better, less isn't always better depends. And then efficiency and flow. Could people get in the flow? How much time does it take to do things? What is the flow like through our system? And here I would probably add a couple dimensions, right? So chanting with some of the early authors to say, you know, trust, not to say trust wasn't important before, but now it is very, very front of mind, right? Before you build your code, like if the compile comes back, you're fine. And like that's the way it is. LLMs are non-deterministic, right? Now we can't just put in a command and get something back and accept it. We really need to evaluate it. So, you know, are we seeing hallucinations? What's the reliability? Does it meet like the style that we would typically write? And if it doesn't meet, is that fine?”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “As useful before. I won't say they weren't possible, but like we just didn't really focus there. So those are prescriptive metrics. When we think about space, space is a framework. It doesn't tell you what metric to use. So I'll say sometimes people get real frustrated because I didn't tell them what to measure, right? But now I think that's the power of it. We're actually seeing that space applies fairly well in these new emerging contexts like AI because we still want to look at so space is an acronym, right? So we still want to look at satisfaction. We still want to look at performance. What's the outcome? We still want to look at activity. Yes, you know, in some ways lines of code and number of PRs can be useful for something, right? Or number of alerts or number of things, activities or counts, sees communication and collaboration. This is also super important and useful because it's how our systems communicate with each other and also how our people do. What proportion of work is being offloaded to a chatbot?”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “We can't just use that blindly now when we're using AI as an example because we have feedback loops much earlier and not even just at like the local build and test phase. We have feedback loops throughout and even sometimes in the middle of some of the pipeline that we really want to leverage in ways that weren't”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I will say if it is a prescriptive metric. It needs to be used only in the way it was prescribed. Dora four, there are four key metrics. There's two speed metrics, deployment frequency and lead time, so code commit to code deploy. There's stability metrics, MTTR and change fail rate. If those are used to assess the speed of the pipeline and the general performance of the pipeline, that's great. If you're trying to use those to understand, because implied to that is feedback loops, right? Because you used to kind of like to get feedback from customers.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “How much of that is fishing generated, right? What types of loops is that creating, and what types of patterns or biases might it be in inferently introducing? So on the one hand, it's not good as a productivity metric, but it can be useful, right? And I'll even say the same for Dora, right? So I have done Dora metrics, their speed metrics, their stability metrics. If that's all you're looking at, it's not going to be sufficient anymore because AI has now changed the way we think about feedback loops, right? They need to be much faster. Now, what door is meant for, you know, kind of assessing the pipeline overall, it's still that works. But we can't just blindly apply the existing metrics we've used before because we'll miss super important phenomenon and changes in the way people work.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Will say there are some things that we can kind of Watch and pay attention to because so lines of code is a productivity metric isn't great, right? It's pretty bad. But now it's kind of more relevant if we can tease out which code came from people and which code came from AI because now we can answer downstream questions. What is the code survivability rate? What is the quality of our code? Is our code being fed back into trained systems? And for that code that's retraining systems later, especially if we're doing like fine tuning and local tuning.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I will say most productivity metrics are a lie. You know, it's really tricky because historically, now look, lines of code has always been a bad metric, right? But many folks still use lines of code. As some proxy, yeah, as some proxy for. Output or productivity or complexity or something, right? Well, now for many of the systems that they would sometimes like whisper and not super talk about that uses lines of code. Just blown out of the water because what do you mean by lines of code? If the goal is more lines of code, I can prompt something to write the longest piece of code ever and add tons of comments. And we know that agents and LLMs tend to be very verbose by definition. And so it's just too easy to gain that system and then introduce complexity and technical debt into all of the work that you're doing.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Then they can like let it run for a few minutes and they can think through something else that's interesting or they anticipate it's going to be hairy and they come back to something that's I mean, probably a little better than vibe coded, right? Because, like, because they were so systematic about it up front. Much closer to something that looks like production code.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “So, I've spoken with a handful of them, and I've kind of watched them work. I haven't built it myself yet on my list. So, they've been able to set up this really incredible workspace and workflow where right now a lot of us play around with tools and we'll put in a prompt and we'll get a few lines back or maybe we'll put in a prompt and we'll get like whole programs back. Well, what they can do is they can, many times I'll see them say to kind of help help prime it is what I want to build. It needs to have these basic architectural components. It needs to have this kind of a stack. It needs to follow like this general workflow help me think that through and it'll kind of design it for it. And then for each piece, it'll assign an agent to go work on each piece in parallel. And then it'll say, oh, and up front, you know, these need to be able to work together, make sure it's architected correctly, make sure we use, you know, appropriate APIs and conventions. Then at the end.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “That can really interrupt. At the same time, though, it can contribute to flow, and I've seen some senior jairs pull together sen toolchains that are really incredible where they figured out how to kind of keep the flow going, right? The fast feedback loops really, really work well for them. They can kind of assign out different pieces to agents. It helps them keep in the flow in terms of instead of details and line by line writing, they're in the flow in terms of what's my goal, what are the pieces that I need to get there, how quickly can I get there so that I can step back and kind of evaluate everything and then dive back in and, you know, fix some pieces.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Lot of times while there are lots of different ways to talk about DevX, right? One way to talk about it is kind of three key things that. Have components that are important of themselves. They also kind of reinforce each other. So flow state is one of them. Cognitive load is another, and then feedback loops are another. And so I think when you touch on this, your question about flow state is a really good one. And I'll admit, you know, we're just a few years into this. We're still figuring out what the best flow state and cognitive requirements are for people in this because to your point, sometimes we're getting interrupted all the time, right? You don't just get in the flow and lock down and write a whole bunch of code and do like the type me of a whole bunch of code as much anymore. Instead, you're kind of creating a prompt, getting some code back and reviewing the code, trying to integrate what's happening in the system.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Yeah. And I love that point, right? Because productivity, first of all, is hard to define anyway. But if you're just looking at output, you can get there a lot of different ways. The mechanics of the plumbing of something, then you don't have the brain space left to come up with really innovative solutions and questions. And so I love that it's kind of this self-reinforcing loop in terms of you do more work, you do better work. It's better for people, it's better for the systems, it's better for our customers.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “So DevX is developer experience. And when we think about developer experience, we're really talking about what it's like to build software day to day for a developer, right? So the friction that they face, the workflows that they have to go through, any support that they have And it's important because what DevX is poor, everything else just isn't going to help, right? The best processes, the best tools, the best whatever magic you have, right? If the DevX is bad, everything kind of takes.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Because, I mean, it was just hitting the scene. It was the topic of so much conversation. And at the same time, so many things don't change, right? So many things are still important, so many things are the same. Yeah, it's also a little while that it's been two and a half years. Time is a social construct.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Some real opportunity there to not just rethink workflows but rethink how we structure our days and how we structure our work. Now we can also make a 45 minute work block useful because getting into the flow is actually kind of handed off at least in part the machine or the machine can help us get back into the flow by reminding us of context and generating diagrams of the system.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “We can't just put in a command and get something back and accept it. We really need to evaluate it. Are we seeing hallucinations? What's the reliability? Does it meet the style that we would typically write?”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Most teams can move faster, but faster for what we can ship trash faster every single day. We need strategy and really smart decisions to know what to ship.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Most productivity metrics are a lie. If the goal is more lines of code, I can prompt something to write the longest piece of code ever. It's just too easy to gain that system.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source