Writing Code Was Never The Bottleneck

The cheapness of generating code with LLMs has shifted the real bottleneck away from typing to the work that comes after. Review, testing, debugging, and the coordination needed to keep a team on the same page still dominate engineering velocity.\n\nWhen a tool like Claude drops a working snippet into a repository, the amount of code flowing through the system grows and the pressure on reviewers spikes. Reviewers often don't know if the author fully understands the submission, encounter unfamiliar patterns, or have to hunt for hidden edge cases. That extra friction can cancel any speed gains from faster code creation.\n\nUnderstanding code is still the hardest part. Even if the code is generated, the effort to reason about its behavior, spot subtle bugs, and ensure long-term maintainability stays the same. Reviewers must also differentiate between generated and handwritten sections, which adds another layer of mental work.\n\nTeams rely on trust and shared context. When code appears faster than it can be discussed, the assumption of quality rises and reviewers and mentors feel the strain. The hidden cost shows up as slower feedback loops and higher stress, not as a faster ship.\n\nLLMs are powerful for prototyping and scaffolding, but they don't eliminate the need for clear thinking, careful review, and thoughtful design. The cost of writing code has dropped; the cost of making sense of it together as a team has not, and that remains the true bottleneck.