The DX Obsession Is Ruining Your Product

The developer tools market is worth $45 billion. That number keeps climbing. And I think a big chunk of it is waste. Before you sharpen your pitchforks — I'm not anti-tooling. I love a good CLI. A well-configured linter sparks joy. But somewhere in the last few years, we crossed a line from "tools that help us ship" to "tools that help us feel productive while shipping nothing." The Setup Spiral You know the pattern. New project kicks off. Before a single feature gets built, someone spends three days configuring the monorepo. Then two more days on the CI pipeline. Then a day on pre-commit hooks. Then someone adds Storybook. Then someone else adds a design system. Then you need documentation for the design system. Then you need a tool to generate the documentation. Week three. Zero features shipped. But the DX? Chef's kiss. Meanwhile, your users are staring at the same broken checkout flow they reported two months ago. The Conference-Driven Development Problem Here's what's actually hap