Development speed is not a bottleneck

This kind of stance cannot be made without properly setting the context for the software. It is very clear that different software backgrounds have different needs a different development strategies that are more efficient.

LLMs are a tool that added a new dimension to explore. While I haven't like many felt actual gains, others are finding, and time will allow us to better judge if those can lead to long term impacts in the economy.

Just based on what I've been reading and experiencing: - Short term POCs can reach validation stage faster. - Mature cloud software needs a lot of extra tooling (LLMs don't understand the codebase, lack of places to derive good context from, and so on). - Anything in between for cloud seems to be a hit or miss, where people are mostly trading first iteration time for more refactoring later down the line.

From another perspective, areas of software where things are a lot more about numbers (cpu time, memory consumption, and so on), may benefit a lot from faster development/coding as the validation phase is either shorter or can be executed in parallel.

The key reality here is that I've been observing higher expectations for deliveries without a proof that we actually got better at coding in general. Which means that sacrifices are being made somewhere.

My experience correlates with this assessment. The closer we are toward prototyping, the bigger leverage we gain from quickly generated swaths of code. It's simply because we don't need to care about all the quality guardrails. After all, it's a prototype.

With a more complex code base (and a less popular tech stack), the perceived gains quickly diminish. Beyond a certain level of tech debt, AI-generated code is utterly useless. It's no surprise that we see people who vibe-coded their products with no technical knowledge whatsoever, and now they call professional engineers to untangle the mess.

A software agency I know well responded to the rise of AI somewhere between the lines of "Now, we'll have plenty of work to clean all that mess!" Admittedly, they always specialized in complex/rescue engineering gigs.

However, the "development as a bottleneck" discussion was set here in a broader context. It's not only how efficiently we are able to deliver bits of functionality, but primarily whether we should be building these things in the first place.

Equally for early-stage startups and established products alike, so much of features are built because someone said so. At the end of the day, they don't deliver any value (if we're lucky) or are plain harmful (if we're out of luck).

In such cases, it would have been better if developers actually sipped coffee and read Hacker News rather than coded/developed/engineered stuff.