We spent decades treating code as the primary bottleneck in software development. Writing it, reviewing it, shipping it — that was the hard part.

That assumption is now outdated.

Today, code is cheap. Understanding is expensive.

The bottleneck moved

With modern tools — especially AI-assisted ones — generating code is no longer the limiting factor. You can produce hundreds of lines in seconds. Boilerplate is trivial. Even non-trivial implementations are increasingly accessible.