For years, I’ve felt that writing lines of code was never the bottleneck in software engineering.
The actual bottlenecks were, and still are, code reviews, knowledge transfer through mentoring and pairing, testing, debugging, and the human overhead of coordination and communication. All of this wrapped inside the labyrinth of tickets, planning meetings, and agile rituals.
These processes, meant to drive quality, often slow us down more than the act of writing code itself because they require thought, shared understanding, and sound judgment.
Now, with LLMs making it easy to generate working code faster than ever, a new narrative has emerged: that writing code was the bottleneck, and we’ve finally cracked it.
But that’s not quite right.
The marginal cost of adding new software is approaching zero, especially with LLMs. But what is the price of understanding, testing, and trusting that code? Higher than ever.
LLMs shift the workload — they don’t remove it
Tools like Claude can speed up initial implementation. Still, the result is often more code flowing through systems and more pressure on the people responsible for reviewing, integrating, and maintaining it.
This becomes especially clear when:
It’s unclear whether the author fully understands what they submitted.
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