Coding Stopped Being the Bottleneck. So What Replaced It?

Back in April, Stephen Koza opened episode two with a claim: coding is not the bottleneck, it is everything else. Over the next ten episodes he put a version of that question to ten engineering leaders, and they did not agree with each other. This episode runs their answers side by side and lands on the one thing they had in common, which is that almost none of the answers were technical.Main Topics Covered:Where the bottleneck actually went once code generation stopped being the constraint, from code review to deployment to go to marketWhy story points are collapsing to a factor of one, and which agile roles can be handed to an agentRequest volume jumping 25x in a month, and why cost optimization is always the first work to get droppedToken costs passing human costs, and the case for hiring people backWhy AI pilots stall on org structure rather than technology, and the argument for thinning vertically before flattening horizontallyThe guests who reject the premise, from the limits of vibe coding to the junior engineer pipeline Guests featured in this episode:Mark Sass, Episode 1: LinkedInFrancisco Trindade, Episode 2: LinkedInDr. Janet Sherlock, Episode 3: LinkedInChris Robertson, Episode 4: LinkedInMeir Wasserman, Episode 5: LinkedInRobert Gonzalez, Episode 6: LinkedInChris Harden, Episode 7: LinkedInJose Gonzalez, Episode 8: LinkedInTom Kershaw, Episode 9: LinkedInPatrick McKinney, Episode 10: LinkedIn Connect with Stephen Koza: LinkedInConnect with EverOps: Website | LinkedInReferences:2025 DORA State of AI-assisted Software DevelopmentThe full write up and checklist on the EverOps site