Engineering Fought Productivity Metrics. AI Ended the Fight

Rising, variable AI token costs (Uber exhausting its 2026 budget in four months, Salesforce's reported ~$300M/year Anthropic bill) have ended engineering's exemption from productivity measurement, but DORA and SPACE show no single metric works, and 2025–2026 data finds AI raises throughput while also raising bugs, incidents and review time. The article argues for attributing AI activity to shipped work and outcomes, using cost per merged pull request, autonomy rate and token yield rate instead of token consumption, and treating committed AI configuration files as maintained code.