← Tuesday, October 20, 2026Practice & careersEssay

Coding models challenge software’s old engineering-bandwidth bottleneck

sanketsaurav.com 6 min read Editor score 6/10

The essay argues that inexpensive access to coding models has ended software’s old rationing of engineering bandwidth, even as software quality has not improved accordingly. Leaders deciding how to use newly abundant implementation capacity may find the framing useful.

What

The essay argues that software engineering's old bottleneck—scarce engineering bandwidth—is giving way as coding models make building software cheaper.

How

It says marginal feature-building costs are approaching zero, while AI in the critical path makes software more expensive to run.

Why it matters

Engineers may need to revisit product tradeoffs shaped by rationing, since building features and experiments is now described as cheap.

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