#13 AIX It’s kind of funny to think much of my career working on DevX was basically just focused on reducing human brain token usage. I always enjoyed building frameworks and tools that enable people to move faster. If we are sitting in front of our computers all day, we might as well get a lot of enjoyment out of building things! Lately, however, I'm no longer sure what Developer Experience means. It's always been somewhat of a soft topic, and good metrics for it were hard to identify. Sure, performance, reliability, and features always mattered but beyond that it was often really just how software made the user feel. That part was often not quantifiable, and reached beyond computers into community and a shared sense of purpose. Does all that still matter? DevX is kind of splitting into optimizing for humans on one side, and agents on the other. I’ve made it a point to improve tools for humans and agents at the same time. After all, improving performance, making the output of a tool better, and errors more actionable is beneficial for both humans and agents. Currently, text seems most efficient, but in the future there might be a better machine-only “language” for DevX. There is also a class of features that have - at least temporarily - become orders of magnitude less important to me. HMR is a good example: I spent so much time getting React Native’s HMR to under 50ms to see live updates as I was typing code, yet I have not needed HMR at all for the past few months. Of course, faster tools mean faster agent turnaround times, too, but HMR is not really part of the agent loop at this time. I’m sure there will also be new DevX paradigms. Maybe even something like HMR in production - which didn’t make sense previously - is now worth building. I wonder what else will matter when it comes to improving “AIX”.

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