AI coding tools have crossed a real threshold in the past year. Cursor and Windsurf count millions of active users. VS Code and JetBrains ship with built-in completion. Tencent Cloud demoed CodeBuddy NPC last month, where an agent takes a task spec, writes the code, opens a PR, runs CI, and fixes failures autonomously until everything goes green. You type a function signature and the model fills in a dozen lines before you finish thinking. Drop a comment saying "add unit tests" and a test skeleton appears in seconds. Individual coding speed is up somewhere between 3x and 5x by most team accounts.
Pull the lens back from the editor to the team level and the picture changes. More code ships faster, but review queues grow longer, test environments get locked more often, and wait times between handoffs actually stretch out. A developer spends 20 minutes writing a feature, waits two hours for review, fixes comments, pushes again, and the staging environment is busy. QA posts failures in the group chat and the developer misses the message while on something else. Hours pass. Actual coding time might account for a tenth of the total delivery cycle. The rest is coordination, waiting, messaging, and context switching. The faster code gets written, the more congestion piles up behind it.
