> Development speed was never the bottleneck; it's all the other processes that take time: infra provisioning, testing, sign-offs, change management, deployment scheduling etc.
So much of Management (both mid and executive) still considers Software as if it were an assembly line; "We make software just like how Ford makes cars". Code as a product.
Which isn't to say that most software development isn't woefully inefficient, but the important bits aren't even considered. "The Work" is seen as being writing code, not the research that goes into knowing what code has to be written.
And for AI marketing, this is almost a videogame-esque weakspot. Microsoft proclaims "50% faster code!" and every management fool thinks "50% faster product; 50% faster money!"
> Large enterprises need to learn how to ship software faster if they want to lock in ROI on their token spend.
It's going to be a disaster once ROI is demanded. Right now everyone is fine with not measuring it; Investors are drunk on hype and nobody within the company actually wants to admit that properly measuring software development productivity is almost impossible.
But the hype won't last forever. Sooner or later investors will see the "$2M spend" and demand "$4M net profit", and that's not going to materialize.
Copilot and Claude won't be tackling the real bottlenecks. They're not going to dredge up decade old institutional knowledge, they won't figure out whether code looks bad because it is bad or because it solves a specific undocumented problem, they won't anticipate future uses.
Code just isn't the product. Not the real work. Really, if your codebase is in a healthy state, it's often a literally free output of the design and research processes. By the time you've refined "our procurement team finds the search hard to use" into a practical ticket, the React component for the appropriate search filters has basically already been written, writing up the code is just a short formality. Asking Copilot would turn a 10 minute job into a 5 minute job. Real impressive, were it not for the 6 hours of meetings and phone calls that went into it.