DX

Today we’re announcing DX Annual, our flagship conference for developer productivity leaders. Since DX’s founding, customers have asked us for a venue to learn from each other and study what the best companies are doing. With AI transforming the SDLC at an unprecedented rate, the need for a gathering like this is more important than ever. The inaugural DX Annual will be held on April 16th in San Francisco, bringing together a curated group of ~400 senior engineering leaders from companies like Pinterest, Nationwide, Dropbox, Netflix, and Dell. If you’re a leader focused on developer productivity and AI transformation, I’d love to see you there. Request an invite: https://dxannual.com

We recently hosted a panel discussion in San Francisco with Developer Productivity leaders from Snowflake, Atlassian, Yelp, and Gusto. A few takeaways: - One organization is shifting away from seat-based pricing because it blocks experimentation and no longer matches how AI is used - Another org tested fully automated Java upgrades, and it failed. When engineers drove the workflow, AI sped up about 10% of migrations - Tool sprawl and growing AI surface area are creating friction, with developers overwhelmed by high volumes of AI review comments, and some teams even building custom assistants after standard tools broke under the scale of their codebase - One team saw a single internal workshop take usage from zero to thousands of connections in one day, showing how quickly adoption breaks when developers don’t know features exist Another thank you to Stephan Hagemann, Rebecca Fitzhugh, Mitali Parthasarathy, and Nathan Hunt for sharing what you’ve tried and are learning with respect to rolling out AI tools. Photo by Sam Khedr

“If I hadn’t discovered DX’s CapEx report, I probably would have been stuck doing this manually for months or even years. It would’ve been a painful process. Instead, it’s just a few clicks.” - Chris Caselas, Head of Technology Provide, a division of Fifth Third Bank and a leader in tech-enabled financial services for small business owners, needed a better way to manage R&D cost capitalization. That’s when Caselas discovered DX’s CapEx reporting functionality. With DX, Provide was able to: - Automate monthly CapEx reporting with a single click - Categorize engineering investment across innovation, maintenance, and other areas - Free up hours of manual work for more strategic initiatives “Getting set up took just a few hours,” Caselas says. “Now it’s a 10-minute process each month. Our finance team loves it, and I can finally rely on the numbers.” Read the full story: https://lnkd.in/gWH59t8w

Engineering organizations need CapEx reporting that’s accurate, audit-ready, and requires as little manual effort as possible… But most teams today still piece this together manually. DX’s CapEx reporting already automates the hard parts of tracking and categorizing engineering work using your own capitalization rules. Now it’s become an even stronger fit for finance and engineering teams with a set of major upgrades: - Save your CapEx rule sets and report options as account-level defaults so reporting stays consistent every month - Customize export columns to match what finance needs without reformatting downstream - Automatically generate clean, finance-friendly exports, complete with a cover sheet and glossary for reviewers - Upload salary data to pre-populate reports and eliminate manual reconciliation

In a few weeks, Laura Tacho is hosting researchers from GitHub, Google, and Microsoft for a year-in-review discussion on AI and developer productivity. Ciera Jaspan, Collin Green, Brian Houck, and Eirini Kalliamvakou will share the most important findings and shifts they observed in 2025, and offer their predictions for what engineering leaders should expect next year. Register to join here: https://lnkd.in/g5qz9JUT

New: filter reports by business hours only. Use this to get a clearer view of metrics like cycle time by excluding nights and weekends from your data.

Exploring the Real Impact of AI on Developer Experience at American Airlines It’s been exciting to demystify how AI is shaping developer workflows. A few early observations from our experiments: - PR cycle time: Significantly faster with AI assistance ✅ - PR size: Larger than before — an area we need to improve! - Review/comment density: Lower overall - also an area that we need to improve! - Review pushback: Higher (quality concerns are real!) With DX, we’re finally able to have meaningful conversations with both executives and developers about what AI is actually changing—and what needs to happen to maximize its value. I’m thrilled about where this journey can take us when we use these tools thoughtfully and responsibly. The potential is incredible!

Last month, DX released Team SLAs. At DX, it’s important to me that we help drive impact, not just more insight. SLAs make metrics actionable by alerting teams about what they need to know, when they need to know it. And because those alerts appear where engineers and managers already work (in Slack or Teams), the data is immediately actionable.