TLDR · MISCELLANEOUS

WHY AI HASN'T REPLACED SOFTWARE ENGINEERS, AND WON'T

normaltech.ai25 min read

Summary from the TLDR newsletter

Writing code was never the bottleneck in software development. Developers spend surprisingly little time coding, and studies have found that using agents to write code has led to little impact on overall productivity. The real bottlenecks are deciding and specifying what to build, verifying and being accountable for what is delivered, and the deep human understanding required to carry out both. AI doesn't make the 'decide' layer thinner - once a decision can be delegated to AI, it is no longer a source of competitive advantage - and humans still need to be accountable for what they deliver.