Comment by simonw
1 hour ago
This piece is really good:
> The cost of building has collapsed, but the cost of aligning organisationally has not. If anything, it's gone up. When three different teams can each produce a working solution to the same problem in the time it used to take to write a proposal, the bottleneck moves from engineering to coordination.
We're still figuring out how to productively use coding agents as individuals, the next challenge is figuring out how to productively use them within teams. Coding agents reduce one bottleneck - producing working code - but that just moves the bottlenecks elsewhere.
(Note I said "working" code and not "good" code, that's a whole other thing.)
The vibe I got from the article was that now that technical work is faster, bosses expect everything else to be proportionally equally accelerated, even though LLMs either don’t help at all at those workloads or actively make things worse.
One mitigating factor is the increased productivity leads to consolidation, aka layoffs, meaning fewer people to align with. (Leading to further increased productivity, more consolidation, and so on ... Whether this is a virtuous cycle or a vicious cycle depends on perspective).
Different teams could already step on each others' toes before AI. If there is confusion over which team ought to develop something it might indicate an organizational problem. Crucially, if you ship something you must be willing to maintain it.