If writing code isn’t the bottleneck, what is?

Boris Cherney, the architect of Claude Code, turned some heads this year by announcing that “coding is solved.”

And anyone who has been using these tools can see why. So why haven’t the massive layoffs happened yet?

Arvind Narayanan, Sayash Kapoor, and Simon Willison point out that the coding wasn’t the bottleneck. It’s us.

A developer’s job is more than just coding. It’s writing emails, attending meetings with stakeholders, working with designers, making decisions, using judgment, and more.

AI can go anywhere and do anything, and as a result, often goes nowhere and does nothing without us to point it in a direction.

And while the layoff scare is far from over, there are some signs that we are not on the brink of a massive job apocalypse. (I’ve held the position that it will be somewhere in the middle. Some jobs will be lost. Others created. And most will shift in their duties and responsibilities. Time will tell.)

It is worth noting:

A fast car still needs a fast driver.

and

As Rohan Rajiv reminds us, “(AI) can genuinely optimize many parts of a workflow. But if that workflow isn’t the constraint, optimizing it changes nothing at the outcome level.