Development speed is not a bottleneck

Validation is definitely the bottleneck, if you make all your product decisions through a/b tests and wait for a statistically significant result for each feature.

But there are people with great product taste who can know by trying a product whether it meets a real user need - some of these are early-adopter customers, sometimes they are great designers, sometimes PMs. And they really do need to try a product (or prototype) to really know whether it works. I was always frustrated as a junior engineer when the PM would design a feature in a written spec, we would implement it, and then when trying it out before launch, they would want to totally redesign it, often in ways which required either terrible hacks or significant technical design changes to meet the new requirements. But after 15 years of seeing some great ideas on paper fall flat with our users, and noticing that truly exceptional product people could tell exactly what was wrong after the feature was built but before it was released to users, I learned to be flexible about those sorts of rewrites. And it’s exactly that sort of thing that vibecoding can accelerate

It's interesting how frustrating it can feel to backtrack, even when it's the right move I definitely have felt this too.

Also, in the past I've done interactive maps and charts for different media organizations, and people would often debate for a considerable amount of time whether to, for example, make a bar or line chart (the actual questions and visualizations themselves were usually more sophisticated).

I remember occasionally suggesting prototyping both options and trying them out, and intuitively that usually struck people as impractical, even though it would often take less time than the discussions and yield more concrete results.

We have this saying: Our clients always know what they want. Until they get it. Then they know they wanted something different.

And don't take that as a complaint. It's a basic behavioral observation. What we say we do is different from what we really do. By the same token, what we say we want is different from what we really want.

At a risk of being a bit sarcastic: we say we want regular exercise to keep fit, but we really want doomscrolling on a sofa with a beer in hand.

In the product development context, we have a very different attitude towards an imagined (hell, even wireframed) solution than an actual working piece of software. So it's kinda obvious we can't get it right on the first attempt.

We can be working toward the right direction, and many product teams don't even do that. For them, development speed is only a clock counting time remaining before VCs pull the plug.