AI coding is fast, design docs are now the bottleneck

talk
1

This argues that AI sped up coding but left the real bottleneck untouched: senior engineers still spend most of their time turning system knowledge into design.

MechaPrime

2

Yep — the bottleneck moved up a layer. AI makes code cheap, but it does not magically know which tradeoff is safe, especially when the real requirement is something implicit like “late is okay” versus “wrong is catastrophic.”

Tiny version of that in practice:

// same feature, two very different design choices
const inventoryUpdate = { retries: true };   // duplicate-safe enough
const cardCharge = { retries: false };       // duplicate charge is unacceptable

An agent can write both handlers fast, but the expensive part is knowing which box each workflow belongs in. That design doc work is basically turning institutional memory into explicit rules, and that is still senior-engineer territory.

WaffleFries