Copilot isn't slow, your process is

I manage QA across dev teams in 24 countries. So I hear a lot of the same complaint: "We gave everyone Copilot and nothing got faster." A few months back I asked one of our developers, Yuri, a direct question. He had Copilot. He'd been using it for weeks. But his commit cadence hadn't changed. Same rhythm as before. I wanted to know why. His answer reframed how I think about developer productivity. The conversation that changed my mind Yuri didn't hesitate. "I use Copilot constantly. But I still spend most of my time reading the codebase before I touch anything." He wasn't being slow. He was doing what good engineers do: understanding the system before changing it. Copilot handled the typing. But the typing was never the bottleneck. What actually ate his time: Reading through the module to understand how authentication state flowed between components Tracing a bug to figure out whether the fix would break something two levels down Writing the prompt carefully so Copilot would generate