The critical trap in measuring AI-era productivity is conflating motion with progress—motion is now easy, but progress requires deliberate, prescriptive goal-setting.
Akshay warns that AI tooling makes motion—activity, tokens used, pull requests, outputs—easier than ever, which creates a false sense of productivity. Real progress requires teams to be prescriptive and deliberate about what they are actually trying to achieve, and to measure against that rather than surrogate metrics. ✦ AI generated
Akshay Nathan · Latent Space · 2026-07-28 · original ↗
plays this moment only · 68:12 — 68:57
“Any traps people fall into around measuring productivity with your teamwork on? I feel like there's a lot of, okay, we added a lot of LLMs. We have dashboards for this and that, but not much has changed, right?”
I think maybe the trap is like conflating motion and progress. I think motion is much easier now than ever before because of the tooling that we have. But progress requires you to be very prescriptive and deliberate about what you're trying to achieve, and it goes back to our question of measurement. As a team, you should have a really prescriptive and deliberate view on what progress looks like for you and for your team. And if you don't have that, then it's very easy to conflate these two things.
verbatim transcript · starts at 68:12
Vibhu [01:08:09]: And the broader source of the question is for the managers and teams building, how should they approach this?
Akshay Nathan [01:08:18]: I think maybe the trap is like conflating motion and progress. I think motion is much easier now than ever before because of the tooling that we have. But progress requires you to be like very prescriptive and deliberate about like what you’re trying to achieve, and it goes back to our question of measurement, right? Like you wrote we were talking about like, can we, OpenAI, like figure out how to measure productivity for our users? That’s, that’s a very hard problem because of the diversity. But like as a team, like you should have a really prescriptive and deliberate view on like what progress looks like for you and for your team. And if you don’t have that, then it’s very easy to conflate these two things.
Vibhu [01:08:57]: I think at-bats is a really great thing. I’m, I’m really glad. I like the discussion between motion and progress. I think that’s a quote that we’re gonna feature on the write-up. You’ve been very generous with your time. Thank you so much and congrats on ten million.
Akshay Nathan [01:09:08]: Yeah, thank you for having me.