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 market
• Why story points are collapsing to a factor of one, and which agile roles can be handed to an agent
• Request volume jumping 25x in a month, and why cost optimization is always the first work to get dropped
• Token costs passing human costs, and the case for hiring people back
• Why AI pilots stall on org structure rather than technology, and the argument for thinning vertically before flattening horizontally
• The 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: LinkedIn
• Francisco Trindade, Episode 2: LinkedIn
• Dr. Janet Sherlock, Episode 3: LinkedIn
• Chris Robertson, Episode 4: LinkedIn
• Meir Wasserman, Episode 5: LinkedIn
• Robert Gonzalez, Episode 6: LinkedIn
• Chris Harden, Episode 7: LinkedIn
• Jose Gonzalez, Episode 8: LinkedIn
• Tom Kershaw, Episode 9: LinkedIn
• Patrick McKinney, Episode 10: LinkedIn

Connect with Stephen Koza: LinkedIn

Connect with EverOps: Website | LinkedIn

References:

• 2025 DORA State of AI-assisted Software Development
• The full write up and checklist on the EverOps site