The new bottleneck is the human, not the model

"Why is everything so slow? You have AI now, let's move faster."

I'm hearing this more and more from Speed & Function clients lately, and honestly it's becoming its own genre of conversation. In their heads a picture formed really fast, that AI just does everything now, so why do you even need developers at all anymore? 🤔

For the developer on the other end of that expectation, it creates pressure on two sides at once. On one side, there's this psychological pressure from expectations that were never realistic to begin with. AI is crazy helpful on some stages of the work and still pretty bad on others.

On the other side, AI genuinely lets you run several tracks in parallel, so you're context-switching constantly between them. Developers who'd been with Speed & Function for years, after a handful of AI-heavy projects, burned out and went on sabbatical.

We're standing in front of a new bottleneck, and it isn't the model, it's the human trying to keep up with it, constantly switching contexts and being overloaded with information.

So who actually wins in this fight between the client pushing for AI-speed and the developer trying to survive it? Psychologists. Psychologists picked up a whole batch of new clients out of this. 🙃

I honestly don't know what to do with this observation yet. Probably it just needs to be said out loud first, so more of us stop pretending the AI-speed expectation is free. Do you see the same pattern with your clients?