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.
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.