Development speed is not a bottleneck

Just to quote one little bit from the piece regarding Google: "In other words, there have been numerous dead ends that they explored, invalidated, and moved on from. There's no knowing up front."

Every time you change your mind or learn something new and you have to make a course correction, there's latency. That latency is just development velocity. The way to find the right answer isn't to think very hard and miraculously come up with the perfect answer. It's to try every goddamn thing that shows promise. The bottleneck for that is 100% development speed.

If you can shrink your iteration time, then there are fewer meetings trying to determine prioritization. There are fewer discussions and bargaining sessions you need to do. Because just developing the variations would be faster than all of the debate. So the amount of time you waste in meetings and deliberation goes down as well.

If you can shrink your iteration time between versions 2 and 3, between versions 3 and 4, etc. The advantage compounds over your competitors. You find promising solutions earlier, which lead to new promising solutions earlier. Over an extended period of time, this is how you build a moat.

The current trend in anti-vibe-coding articles is to take whatever the vibe coding maximalists are saying and then stake out the polar opposite position. In this case, vibe coding maximalists are claiming that LLM coding will dramatically accelerate time to market, so the anti-vibe-coding people feel like they need to claim that development speed has no impact at all. Add a dash of clickbait (putting "development speed" in the headline when they mean typing speed) and you get the standard LLM war clickbait article.

Both extremes are wrong, of course. Accelerating development speed is helpful, but it's not the only factor that goes into launching a successful product. If something can accelerate development speed, it will accelerate time to market and turnaround on feature requests.

I also think this mentality appeals to people who have been stuck in slow moving companies where you spend more time in meetings, waiting for blockers from third parties, writing documents, and appeasing stakeholders than you do shipping code. In some companies, you really could reduce development time to 0 and it wouldn't change anything because every feature must go through a gauntlet of meetings, approvals, and waiting for stakeholders to have open slots in their calendars to make progress. For anyone stuck in this environment, coding speed barely matters because the rest of the company moves so slow.

For those of us familiar with faster moving environments that prioritize shipping and discourage excessive process and meetings, development speed is absolutely a bottleneck.