Leadership across companies expects AI to magically cut time-to-ship in half.
Yes, AI can help engineers code faster. But coding was never the bottleneck.
The real drag is non-tech stuff - planning, periodic status updates, cross-team coordination, unclear requirements, stakeholder alignment, reviews, approvals, handoffs, deployment cycles, and on-call rotations.
Cumulatively, that’s ~80% of the work.
Optimizing the remaining ~20% cannot produce a 50% reduction.
If leaders really want to see gains, they should focus less on coding velocity and more on eliminating process friction.