Everyone Accelerates, Nobody Arrives

A few months ago, a developer productivity tool reported that it had doubled the output of the engineers who used it. The number circulated quickly — cited in earnings calls, repeated in newsletters, treated as proof that something important was shifting.

What the number didn't say: where the output went.

The developers worked the same hours. Their salaries didn't change. Their companies hired fewer people and captured the difference. Revenue flowed to the tool vendors, then to the chip manufacturers, then to shareholders. Asset values rose. Daily lives, largely, did not.

This is what it looks like when a system optimizes for its own continuation rather than any human outcome. Not malice. Not even negligence. Just the aggregate of reasonable individual decisions, producing a result that nobody chose and nobody especially wanted.

The assumption is usually that capital accumulation is where the benefit finally concentrates — that somewhere, someone is receiving a proportionate reward. But watch the people at that end for long enough and the picture gets complicated. More assets mean more to manage, more to protect, more decisions to make. The hours are still twenty-four. The anxiety, in many cases, increases rather than disappears.

The money circulates faster than before. It doesn't seem to land.

There's a question worth sitting with here. Not "how do I become someone who benefits?" — that's the question the system is already optimized to answer. But something closer to: what would it mean to build something that actually arrives somewhere?

Not opting out. That's not on offer. But holding a different frame while building — not "how do I move faster?" but "where does this land?"

It's a harder question to optimize for. That might be exactly why it doesn't get asked.