One inescapable conclusion I’ve had to draw observing our industry over the last couple of years is that the AI thing isn’t about productivity. If it was, teams would be looking for ways to improve outcomes. But that’s not what I’ve been seeing.在过去几年观察我们这个行业后，我得出了一个无法回避的结论：AI 这件事的核心根本不在于生产力。如果真是这样，团队应该会致力于寻找改善产出的方法。但我看到的并非如此。
I’ve seen dev teams setting out with the specific goal to use AI coding agents as much as possible, with the impact a secondary (or even a thirdary) concern.我看到一些开发团队设定的具体目标就是尽可能多地使用 AI 编码助手，而产出影响却成了次要（甚至第三位）的考量。
I’ve watched developers prompting Claude Code to rename classes or methods when there’s a shortcut in their editor that will do it with a fraction of the keystrokes, using a tiny, tiny fraction of the compute and the energy, and do it more reliably.我见过开发人员提示 Claude Code 去重命名类或方法，而他们的编辑器里明明有快捷键可以用极少的按键次数完成这项工作，且消耗的计算资源和能量微乎其微，结果也更可靠。
I’ve watched them task Copilot with finding unused code when background compilation has already identified it.我见过他们让 Copilot 去查找无用代码，而后台编译早就已经识别出这些代码了。
I’ve watched them explain the code they want to Codex in more words than the code itself, and the model still gets it wrong.我见过他们向 Codex 解释想要的代码，写出的描述文字比代码本身还多，结果模型还是弄错了。
Arguably these people have lost the plot.可以说，这些人已经本末倒置了。
And there are those other teams; the ones who use the best tool for the job. Need a refactoring? IntelliJ or Rider or PyCharm’s got you covered most of the time. Wanna know where the unused code is? Your IDE’s showing you. And if you don’t have that feature, a linter will do it lickety-split without the need for a £20,000 GPU and a terabyte of VRAM. If you know what code you need, maybe just write it. M’kay?当然，还有另外一些团队；那些懂得为工作选择最佳工具的团队。需要重构？IntelliJ、Rider 或 PyCharm 大多数时候都能搞定。想知道无用代码在哪里？你的 IDE 会直接告诉你。如果你的 IDE 没有这个功能，用 Lint 工具也能瞬间解决，根本不需要耗费价值 2 万英镑的 GPU 和 1TB 的显存。如果你知道自己需要什么代码，或许直接写出来就行了。明白吗？
And then they hit a gap in their tooling. They need to move an instance method in Python. PyCharm doesn’t have that refactoring. So they go the agent window:然后，当他们遇到工具无法覆盖的盲区时——比如需要在 Python 中移动一个实例方法，而 PyCharm 没有对应的重构功能——他们才会转向代理窗口：
> Move the method calculateDiscount from the Order class to the Product class
And – 90% of the time – the model will do what they need. (And, annoyingly, sometimes more than they need.)而且——90% 的情况下——模型能完成他们所需的工作。（虽然令人烦恼的是，有时它做得比需要的还要多。）
To perform the refactoring by hand would usually take longer, so they make a rational choice to throw the dice if it will save some time.手动进行重构通常会花更长时间，所以如果能节省时间，他们做出“赌一把”的理性选择也是合理的。
These are the teams whose outcomes have improved. Lead times and release cycles have shrunk a little, and it hasn’t been at the price of reliability.这些团队的产出确实得到了改善。交付周期和发布周期缩短了一些，而且并没有以牺牲可靠性为代价。
And that’s what this is supposed to be about, right? Better outcomes. Bang for the buck. Or should I say “Bang for the token”?这才是这件事本该有的意义，对吧？更好的结果。物有所值。或者我该说“Token 有所值”？
