Many (myself included) claim AI driven (or in my case, assisted) development is resulting in massive productivity acceleration and gains. But there is some obvious and troubling evidence to the contrary.
The frontier AI labs, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc, are the leaders in the creation and adoption of tooling and systems for AI driven development - eg. Anthropic and OpenAI claim 100% of their code is written by AI .
If so, why is the pace of innovation and updates in their AI development products (Codex, Claude Code, Antigravity) so pedestrian? Compare the rate of improvement in their products to products from other multi-billion dollar companies, or indeed to the rate of innovation before the advent of AI driven development, and you’re hard pressed to find anything justifying the claims of acceleration. The release notes are so mundane I barely care.
Where are the productivity gains? I’m certainly seeing it in our own development process - I’m absolutely convinced we’d be far behind where we are had we not embraced AI assisted development processes - but industry-wide something is amiss.
I don’t have a clear thesis yet, but I’m working on a few ideas. For one, I think writing code is not the major bottleneck to development - indeed if you examine software development processes in the “enterprise” you’ll see that both from a time and resource perspective, writing code is a fraction of the overall allocation. According to IDC application development is only 16% of developers’ time. Similarly, the number of developers in “enterprise” application development is generally ¼ of the overall team size, with the PM, architecture, design, QA, security, and DevOps teams making up the remaining ¾.
With AI driven or assisted development we’re optimizing a local bottleneck in a large and complex process, and are therefore constrained in how much acceleration we achieve. Future phases will need to look at the overall process holistically and optimize the entire pipeline, perhaps in the mold of Toyota Production Systems approaches (Lean, Muda, Muri, Mura, and Takt Time).
I’ll explore a couple of other ideas in future posts, but I’m most curious to hear what others are seeing and thinking.