Real title: Coding has never been the bottleneck
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this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
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Sharing this from the article to hopefully save the post a few downvotes:
Coding was never the bottleneck. Not recently. Not in the last decade. Arguably not since we stopped feeding punchcards into machines.
Thank you! I've added the image to the post as well.
I feel this so much. I started doing a rewrite of a plugin wanting to understand how it does its work and the real bottleneck is not knowing what's being done, not how to write it down
Kind of on the author for giving the article a clickbaity title.
Today there’s lots of interest in “specification driven development” with GenAI as if it’s the hot new thing.
Agree with the author — “specification driven development” is like saying cold ice cream is the hot new thing.
I've long maintained that actually writing code is only a small part of the job. Understanding the code that exists and knowing what code to write is 90% of it.
I don't personally feel that gen AI has a place in my work, because I think about the code as I'm writing it. By the time I have a complete enough understanding of what I want the code to do in order to write it into a prompt, the work is already mostly done, and banging out the code that remains and seeing it come to life is just pure catharsis.
The idea of having to hand-hold an LLM through figuring out the solution itself just doesn't sound fun to me. If I had to do that, I'd rather be teaching an actual human to do it.
The new bottleneck is reviewing the generated slop.
Well now writing/reviewing the code really is the bottleneck.
I meant reviewing the code generated by coworkers 🫤
So not really any materially different from 10 years ago?
Oh I know, I was agreeing with you! I obviously wasn’t clear though based on my number of upvotes.
Just seems funny
Was writing code the bottleneck before? Or was it planning, alignment, learning, iteration, testing, etc?
That's exactly what the article is about. Please read it, it's good.
You caught me reacting to the headline without reading it. I will check it out.