---
title: "Our Yearly Total Sat Near 900 Until Something Arrived"
canonical: https://dxdev.com/everyday-ai/numbers-changed-the-story-i-was-telling/
datePublished: 2026-07-04
---
At almost one in the morning, we were reading four years of our own work history on a phone. We had a simple question in front of us: what had the new helper actually changed?

The record we were reading is called **git**. It is a dated list of saved changes, a little like a notebook that records every time someone puts a new version of a recipe on the kitchen counter. We were not hunting for a grand theory. We wanted to know whether the feeling that things had sped up was real.

Our first answer had been the easy one. We said we were faster.

That answer did not hold up. It was too loose to tell us what had improved, what had not, or what to do next. It also cost us a late night, because we had to go back and find a better answer instead of trusting the story we had been telling ourselves.

## What the count showed

So we counted the saved changes, year by year. Before the helper arrived, our own total had stayed close to 900 a year. In the first six months after it arrived, it was 1,105. That points to roughly 2,200 over a full year, more than twice the old pace.

Work that had once appeared only now and then was also showing up more often. One person who had previously made only seven saved changes had made 106 in six months. A project we would once have expected to take months went from first idea to live use in about eight weeks. Of the 30 saved changes behind it, only one was ours.

Those numbers made the word "faster" look too small.

## Where the work had been waiting

The bigger change was where work used to sit. For years, hard questions tended to come back to us for a look. Visual work tended to wait until someone could describe the idea, discuss it, and then turn it into something real. That is like having two checkout lines in a small grocery store. It does not matter how quickly people fill their baskets if everyone has to stand in the same two lines at the end.

The helper changed that shape. Instead of waiting to explain an idea in a meeting, we could make a rough version first. Instead of asking for a design in the abstract, we could put something visible on the table and talk about that. Instead of our evenings disappearing into tiny adjustments to how a screen looked, more of that work could move without coming back to us.

## What a count cannot tell you

Nothing about this meant that every saved change was good. A count can tell you that more things moved. It cannot tell you whether each one was useful, large, or carefully made. The helper also encouraged smaller, more frequent changes, so the count rose for that reason too. Some changes recorded under our names came from sessions where the helper did much of the drafting.

Numbers are useful when they stop us from guessing. They are less useful when we treat them like a report card.

The most important number went the other way. The notes left during review had tripled. They had gone from about two notes on a piece of work to about five. A person, not the helper, was looking closely, asking harder questions, and catching things before they went further.

That made something plain. When it becomes easier to produce more work, judgment becomes the scarce thing. The person who can say "This is clear," "This will confuse people," or "This is not ready" becomes more important, not less.

We had started with a question about output. The answer was about shape. Work was no longer stopping in the same places, and that gave different people room to do work they could not easily do before.

## If you try a helper of your own

Start with something other than whether it made you faster. A raw count of saved changes can rise for reasons that say nothing about quality, so pair it with a measure of review, such as the number of notes left on each piece of work. Then pick one job that has been waiting on the same person, approval, or explanation for too long, and see what changes when a rough, visible version goes in front of that person first.