The code got faster and the handoffs did not
A longitudinal study of 400 companies found AI use up 65 per cent and delivery up under 8, more than half of America's exploited-vulnerability catalogue was confirmed exploited a year or more after the flaw was named, and npm now has a token that can stage a release but cannot ship one.
How we Organise
AI use rose sixty-five per cent and throughput rose under eight
DX has been running a longitudinal study of AI adoption against engineering delivery, and analysed a random sample drawn from 400 companies between November 2024 and February 2026. AI usage rose 65 per cent across that window. Pull request throughput rose 7.76 per cent. Teams that set pull request targets for individual engineers were dropped from the sample, so nobody here is gaming a number they are judged on. DX then asked developers why the gain was not bigger. The answer came back the same way each time. Writing code was never the bottleneck. One of them described a four-day task taking three.
Our position is that a team which must ask somebody else before it can ship does not really own what it is held to.
A boundary is real only when a team can go from idea to running software without asking anyone’s permission.
The five things those developers named were planning, alignment, scoping, review and handoffs. Every one of them is a place where the asking happens, and not one of them moved. The spending went to the part of the job that was never the constraint. A client scoping this as a tooling rollout with a productivity target attached is buying the 65 and budgeting for the 7.76. Throughput is a crude measure, and a team shipping fewer and larger changes would read as flat. The mechanism is interview evidence rather than telemetry. DX sells the measurement too.
How we Build
More than half the catalogue was confirmed exploited a year or more after the flaw was named
America’s catalogue of vulnerabilities known to be exploited is published as a file anybody can read. Version 2026.09.18 holds 1,716 entries. Set each entry’s date of addition against the year in its own identifier and 966 of them, 56 per cent, were added in a later year. For 692 the gap runs to two years or more. The three added on 18 September are all Linux kernel flaws, and two of those carry 2025 numbers. Federal agencies have three days to fix them.
We judge a patching policy by what it does in the quiet months rather than during an incident.
Currency is safer than stability.
The usual case for deferring an upgrade is that nothing is known to be exploiting the thing yet. On this catalogue’s own history, that case is wrong more often than it is right. A firm that deferred was reasoning from the list as it stood, and for 966 entries the list moved afterwards while nothing changed on the firm’s side. What the catalogue records is when exploitation was confirmed rather than when it began. So a long gap may mean slow attackers or slow confirmation, and those two readings point opposite ways. The population is what American federal agencies run.
The token can stage the release and cannot ship it
GitHub has added a stage-only permission to npm’s granular access tokens. A workflow holding one runs npm stage publish to submit a version, and a maintainer then approves the release with two-factor authentication. A direct publish from that token is refused, even where it was configured to skip two-factor for automation. The token keeps its other write permissions, so it can still move dist-tags and deprecate versions. npm is removing direct publishing through bypass-2FA tokens in January 2027, and this is the route offered to anybody who cannot move to trusted publishing before then.
We put it to a client this way: the steps you cannot take back are the ones that need a name against them.
Every run is bounded by a declared scope: what it may reach and act on, what it may do that cannot be undone, and the step, time and spend at which it stops; and every act within that scope that cannot be undone either waits for a named person’s approval before it executes or carries a recorded compensating action.
Publishing a version to a public registry is the plainest case there is. Until now the only control was how carefully somebody guarded the credential, which governs the actor rather than the act. Staging moves it onto the act. The new boundary is narrower than its name suggests. A dist-tag move is how most consumers get what they install, and that stays available to the same token. So a token that cannot publish new code can still redirect a large share of installs. A client reading stage-only as read-only has read it wrong.