AI Won’t Save the 20% of Developer Time You’re Wasting on Friction
Every engineering leader wants their team to move faster.
Ship more. Deliver with fewer headaches.
But there’s one brutal truth we can’t ignore:
On average, developers waste 20% of their time every single week.
That’s a full day lost. Every. Week.
Not because the team isn’t talented. Not because they aren’t working hard.
They’re losing it to friction.
Unclear requirements.
Slow build pipelines.
Broken tests.
Poor documentation.
Meetings that slice up the day until there’s no focus time left.
I hate to break it to you, but leaders who think AI is going to magically fix this are fooling themselves.
If your team is already drowning in wasted time, AI doesn’t save you.
It just helps you paddle faster in the wrong direction.
The 20% Tax You Don’t See
Laura Tacho, CTO at DX, shared research that developers waste 20% of their time on inefficiencies and poor processes. That’s the average. Some teams are worse.
It’s not “beer fridges and ping pong tables” bad.
It’s organizational bad.
Waiting for clarity because requirements are half-baked or keep shifting.
Waiting for feedback because tests take forever or PRs sit in review limbo.
Waiting for decisions because the business context is missing and everything stalls until the next meeting.
Every wait creates drift. Every drift costs time. Multiply that across a team of 20 engineers and you’re losing a month of productivity every sprint.
And the more layers you add — more handoffs, more shit shielding, more meetings — the harder it becomes for developers to actually get momentum.
Focus Time Is the Scarce Resource
Most leaders talk about velocity. Few talk about focus.
But developer productivity is deeply tied to whether an engineer gets long, uninterrupted stretches of focus time.
When every day is chopped up with status calls, Slack pings, and shifting priorities, developers aren’t coding. They’re context switching.
The cost isn’t just hours lost. It’s energy. Cognitive load. Momentum.
Think about the last time you were in flow and someone tapped you on the shoulder. (Or the Slack ding went off). It takes 15–30 minutes to get back. Now imagine that happening five times a day. That’s the reality of most engineering teams.
And when developers can’t find time to think deeply, they can’t solve problems creatively. They end up stuck in reactive mode. Shipping tasks, not outcomes.
AI Won’t Save You
Here’s the belief I hear a lot right now:
“AI is going to fix developer productivity.”
It won’t. Not if you’re already losing that 20%.
AI can autocomplete code.
It can generate tests.
It can even draft documentation.
But if your developers don’t know what problem they’re solving, or they can’t get through a single hour without interruption, AI just adds more noise.
AI multiplies speed, not clarity.
That’s why the companies seeing the biggest gains from AI are the ones that already solved the fundamentals of developer experience:
Fast pipelines.
Clear requirements.
Lightweight processes.
Documentation people can actually find.
Leadership that protects focus time.
They don’t waste 20% of their week.
So when they layer in AI, the benefits compound.
But if you’re still struggling with friction, AI just accelerates the waste.
The Leadership Lesson
I used to think my job as a CTO was protecting my team from business chaos.
Keep them in the code. Keep them focused.
But shielding developers from context is the opposite of leadership.
When engineers don’t know the why behind the work, every decision gets delayed. They can’t move without a meeting, a ticket, or a manager’s approval.
That’s where the 20% loss comes from.
That’s why focus evaporates.
Leadership isn’t about shielding.
It’s about clarity.
Clarity fuels progress.
Clarity turns wasted time into forward motion.
Clarity is what keeps your team moving even when you’re not in the room.
Questions for Leaders
If you’re serious about developer productivity, forget the hype cycle for a moment.
Don’t ask, “How will AI transform my engineering team?”
Ask this instead:
Where is my team losing that 20% every week?
Am I creating focus time or crushing it?
Do my engineers know the why, or are they just waiting for the next ticket?
Fix that first.
Because the real productivity problem isn’t solved by AI.
It’s solved by leaders who remove friction, protect focus, and give their teams the clarity to keep going without getting stuck at every turn.
This article scratches the surface of a much deeper discussion I had with Laura Tacho, CTO of DX. We broke down what developer experience really means, why AI helps some teams and hurts others, and how leaders can stop wasting 20% of their team’s time.