Christopher Justice · AI-Native Development
The Bottleneck Moved. Your Process Didn't.
For decades, the bottleneck in software development was writing code. It was slow, expensive, and required specialized skills. Everything else — planning, coordination, documentation — existed to…
# The Bottleneck Moved. Your Process Didn't.
For decades, the bottleneck in software development was writing code. It was slow, expensive, and required specialized skills. Everything else — planning, coordination, documentation — existed to make coding more efficient.
AI removed that bottleneck. Code generation is fast now. Iteration is cheap.
But most teams are still running processes designed for the old constraint. They're optimizing for a bottleneck that no longer exists.
When writing code was expensive, it made sense to:
Plan extensively. Getting requirements wrong meant weeks of wasted coding. Better to invest days in planning than weeks in rework.
Coordinate carefully. Multiple coders working on the same system needed synchronization. Daily standups, sprint planning, detailed tickets — all coordination mechanisms.
Estimate precisely. Stakeholders needed to know what would ship when. Since coding was the slow part, estimating coding time told you something useful.
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