Melvin’s Reviews > Frictionless: 7 Steps to Remove Barriers, Unlock Value, and Outpace Your Competition in the AI Era > Status Update

Friction is anything that slows down or gets in the way of completing work.

DevEx initiatives focus on how seamlessly AI assistance integrates into developers’ day-to-day workflows.

“Developer experience takes a broader view of throughout the entire development lifecycle. It examines everything from onboarding and coding to testing, deploying and monitoring. DevEx initiatives might identify problems that require platform engineering solutions, but they could also address friction points in processes, communication, or team dynamics that no platform could solve.”

Good developer experience isn’t just about making developers happy—it’s about removing friction to accelerate business outcomes.

Improving DevEx is about systematically removing friction so developers can create value. Better tools (e.g., AI) are part of the equation, but so are clearer processes, fast feedback loops, and reduced cognitive load.

AI acceleration shifts the bottleneck from creation to validation. Hence the need to have metrics and data that signal the health of the entire development pipeline to address friction before it undermines the AI investment and derails productivity gains.

DevEx asks “what is it actually like to build and ship software here?” (instead of “how do we build software faster?”)

The answer to this question reveals friction points / opportunities for improvement.

The fundamentals of DevEx are managing cognitive load, optimizing feedback loops, and maintaining flow state.

What is Developer Experience (DevEx)?

DevEx captures the quality of interactions developers have around the tools, processes, and people they work with when trying to get their job done.

DevEx becomes even more critical in the AI era, because while AI accelerates creation, teams still need robust systems to test, deploy, and maintain that code at scale.

Organizations that invest in DevEx will be the ones that move faster, build better, and lead the future.

To succeed in transformations like AI, organizations need to make sure their investments truly enable developers to deliver better software—faster, more reliably, and more securely.