The bottleneck was never the code

The article argues that while coding agents like Codex significantly increase individual programming productivity, the real bottleneck in software development has never been writing code itself, but rather the collaboration and communication required for teams to agree on what should be built. Drawing on decades-old software engineering literature, the author contends that as the cost of producing code falls dramatically through AI assistance, the harder work of negotiation and consensus-building among team members becomes the primary limiting factor in how fast software projects actually progress.