AI coding shouldn't be infinitely fast: review and testing are the real constraints, argues Allen Holub

nodosenlared · x · 2026-10-03

Allen Holub pushes back on the notion that AI-assisted coding should be frictionlessly fast. In a thought experiment: if all bottlenecks vanished and you shipped eight months' worth of work every eight hours, with 10% of the program changing each cycle, users would constantly find previously working features broken and relearn chunks of the app—rendering it effectively unusable. The 'slowness' of review and testing isn't waste to eliminate but a necessary constraint keeping software coherent.

Original post →

More from coding & agent

coding & agent channel →