I'm a big fan of this explanation/rant from Andrew Murphy.

Taken as a whole, there are many bottlenecks in a corporate software development process. The "load-bearing" calendar is a great example!

Speeding up code creation just increases pressure on the bottleneck, which decreases throughput.

https://andrewmurphy.io/blog/if-you-thought-the-speed-of-writing-code-was-your-problem-you-have-bigger-problems

If you thought the speed of writing code was your problem - you have bigger problems | Debugging Leadership

AI coding tools are optimising the wrong thing and nobody wants to hear it. Writing code was already fast. The bottleneck is everything else: unclear requirements, review queues, terrified deploy cultures, and an org chart that needs six meetings to decide what colour the button should be.

Debugging Leadership

So why are we still trying to optimize code creation?

For decades, people with power - executives and product people - have been shifting the blame for strategy failures and poor market insight onto development "productivity."

This AI moment should be incredibly clarifying. Like, it should be the reductio ad absurdum of a productivity-centric approach.

The fact that we are *not* seeing wildly improving software all around us tells us everything we need to know.

There is no flourishing of value delivery, new product categories, more needs being satisfied better. It’s the opposite.

All we are seeing is decreases in quality, because πŸ‘ code πŸ‘ creation πŸ‘ is not πŸ‘ the problem.

@elizayer There's the expression of resonating strongly with something, in this case the rumble from the resonation is deafening. 🫨

We have a really small team at work, with widely varying levels of experience. In this team I've been the firehose that produces more code than anybody can review, if just left to my devices like in the olden days. These days, with the introduction of mandated reviews and sprints and whatnot, I spend maybe a week having fun coding and then couple of weeks spinning wheels and getting bored and frustrated while waiting for reviews. And now they're starting to *mandate* use of AI agents for work "to accelerate" *wild handwaving* everything. For deitys sake.

I suppose their vision of the workflow is for the humans to describe what they want, have AI generate the code and then the human can review it by themselves. It does change the review dynamics for sure, but it doesn't remove the bottleneck - it would still be review, just going even slower because the human is now required to understand the random slop generated by a thing that doesn't think in the process of creation. Vitally, it also eliminates the sanity check of another human being in the loop. We all sometimes get carried away and lose perspective, and it takes another person boggling at your creation from a distance, "what the heck are you trying to accomplish here?" πŸ˜„

Finally, that workflow would also eliminate the single item I actually care about my work: lovingly crafting and carving code. I will not be sitting around reviewing AI slop for the rest of my career.