Talk Is Cheap: The Operational Impact of LLM Use

# Summary According to data from Faros.ai analyzing 4,000 software development teams over two years, increased LLM adoption correlates with reduced software shipped to production, slower system flow across all development stages, and a net loss in product quality and throughput despite improvements in individual developer productivity. The author argues that while LLMs improve developer-level metrics by approximately 1.16x, they simultaneously accelerate defect injection and relocate defect removal to the review stage, ultimately destroying value at scale because product throughput—not developer productivity—is what customers pay for.