Laura Tacho

Laura Tacho, described in the sources as an expert in developer experience, works at DX and appears in two notes fifteen months apart, both concerned with the same problem: how engineering organizations tell whether AI is actually helping.

The September 2025 note, co-written with Gergely Orosz, surveys 18 tech companies including Google, GitHub, Microsoft and Dropbox. Its finding is that 85% of engineers use AI tools while many engineering leaders cannot evaluate their real value, having nothing better than surface measures like lines of code. Tacho and Orosz introduce the AI Measurement Framework, which combines existing core engineering metrics (change failure rate, PR throughput, PR cycle time, developer experience) with AI-specific ones such as adoption rate, tool CSAT, time saved per engineer and AI spend. The insistence on pairing speed with quality is deliberate: they warn that AI-assisted development can produce "the biggest pile of technical debt" if left unmanaged. Dropbox reached 90% AI adoption, with engineers merging 20% more pull requests and a lower change failure rate.

At the Thoughtworks retreat reported by Martin Fowler in February 2026, Tacho stated that the Venn diagram between developer experience and agent experience is a perfect circle: whatever eases the work of human developers also eases the work of agents. She paired this with an observation about incentives. Executives now grant LLMs the documentation, code clarity and clean environments they had refused their own teams.