The Invisible Tax
Your AI coding tool didn’t save you time. It just moved the bill to a different line item.
Real John… I’m finally almost done with my book. It is a short read, but going through some edits.. pretty excited about that. 10 years plus in the making. But we’ll see what happens. Regardless, it is something I’ve wanted to do, so hopefully you’ll enjoy it. Ok, this week is all about code reviews vs code development with AI. Sure AI can produce code at record speed, but is it good? Who knows? You do. That’s why most of your time is now spent reviewing code, training AI, and QA’ing the slop it produced until it produces amazing results. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE AI, but you can’t start a new session and get a one-shot perfect application end to end. You need to work with it and help it learn how to be better. Be patient and you’ll love it. Be impatient and you’ll hate it for the result, the cost, and the time you didn’t spend working with it. Ok, let’s get into this week… See you soon.
Oh, 2 of Spades… if you know you know, got a new invisible palm technique that I’m working on that is pretty cool. Ok, back to the newsletter.
I want you to try something. Go find your engineering team’s velocity dashboard. Look at the line that says “time to write code.” Look at it go down. Look at everyone in the room nod like we just cured cancer.
Now ask a different question: how much time is your team spending reviewing what the AI wrote?
Nobody has that dashboard. That’s the whole problem.
A Harness survey just dropped and it says the quiet part out loud: 81% of engineering leaders admit the time they saved writing code with AI is being eaten alive by reviewing AI’s code. Not “some of it.” Not “a little.” Eaten. Nearly a third of a developer’s day now goes to this invisible work. It doesn’t show up in your sprint report. It doesn’t show up in your board deck. It shows up in your engineers being exhausted and nobody knowing why.
We Measured the Wrong Thing On Purpose
Here’s what actually happened. Every AI coding vendor needed a number to sell you, so they picked “lines of code generated per hour” or “PRs opened per week” because those numbers go up fast and look great in a sales deck. They did not pick “hours spent verifying that the AI didn’t import a library that doesn’t exist” because that number is annoying and doesn’t sell licenses.
I’ve built two products with these tools — Cash Critters and StatusSage — for about $50 a month combined in tooling. I’m not anti-AI. I’m anti-lying-to-yourself-with-a-dashboard. The AI genuinely writes code faster than a human. Nobody’s arguing that. But “faster to generate” and “faster to ship” are two completely different claims, and right now companies are reporting the first one and pretending it’s the second.
This is the same trick the industry always pulls. Remember when “lines of code” was the metric? Then everyone realized more lines of code usually meant a worse solution, not a better one. We’re doing that again, just with an AI logo slapped on the dashboard.
Where the Tax Actually Gets Paid
The overhead isn’t imaginary, and it isn’t going away. It’s the hallucinated import that looks legitimate until your build breaks in staging. It’s the business logic that runs perfectly and does the wrong thing. It’s the “silent failure” that passes every unit test the AI also wrote, because of course it grades its own homework consistently.
That’s not a productivity story. That’s a trust story. And trust doesn’t show up on a burndown chart, it shows up three weeks later when a customer finds the bug your team never saw because everyone was too busy admiring how fast the PR got opened.
What I’d Actually Do About It
Track review time as its own metric, starting this week. Not “cycle time.” Review time specifically. If you can’t see the cost, you can’t manage the cost.
Stop rewarding PR volume. If your team’s incentive is “ship more PRs,” you’ve just told everyone to generate more stuff for someone else to verify. Reward verified, shipped, working software instead.
Give your best people the hallucination check, not the boilerplate. The most experienced engineer on your team should be doing the highest-leverage verification, not writing CRUD endpoints an agent can already handle.
Ask your team the honest question in your next 1:1. Not “is AI helping you?” Ask “where did AI cost you time this week that nobody’s tracking?” You will get an earful, and it will be useful.
The tools aren’t the lie. The dashboard is the lie. AI is a legitimate amplifier of what your team can do, but only if you’re honest about where the hours actually go. Measure the real thing or don’t bother measuring at all.
Go build something amazing. Just make sure someone’s actually checking it before it ships.
John Mann is the founder of Startups and Code LLC, a software engineering executive, and the guy who built Cash Critters for $50/month because constraints are a feature, not a bug. Subscribe for weekly takes on AI, startups, and building things that matter.