"AI Changes the Bottleneck From Delivery to Something Else"

Delivering Shit Was Never the Bottleneck, Except For Truly Shitty Organizations

That’s a big fat lie. The constraints didn’t change.

It’s technical people who are used to operating in silos that believe the constraints have changed.

Delivering shit was never the bottleneck, except for truly shitty organizations.

• More features isn’t better. Even in the age of AI.

• More lines of code isn’t better. This still holds true with or without AI.

• A bloated codebase still sucks and drags the whole company down. You can get there now even faster with AI.

In fact, if you believe your constraint has changed, your ability to deliver value will be further out of reach than ever before.

Just look at social media: we’re being flooded with AI slop, because of the ‘More Is Better’ paradigm.

Yes, more is being shipped than ever, but we can all safely say that ain’t great AT ALL. We’re just seeing MORE crappy features.

More isn’t better. In most cases we actually want ‘Less But Better’.

That still hasn’t changed.

Let’s illustrate this by using a much simpler example: writing.

Writing a Book By Blinking

Jean-Dominique Baby suffered a stroke and lapsed into a coma. He awoke 20 days later unable to move anything except his head and eyes. His mental capacities were unaltered and he was fully aware of what’s going around him. This cruel phenomenon is called Locked-In Syndrome (LIS).

Bauby wrote a whole book by only blinking his left eyelid. It took him two months, working 3 hours a day, 7 days a week. The volume took 200.000 blinks to write at an average of two minutes per word.

His book was called ‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’. It sold many millions and even turned into movie starring Mathieu Amalric who you might know from the Grand Budapest Hotel, The Phoenician Scheme or Quantum of Solace.

I can write 120 words per minute. I’m easily a 100X faster writer than Jean-Dominique Baby was. Yet I will never write a multi-million bestseller like he did. Even if AI makes me 10.000X faster at writing than him.

The Bottleneck Hasn’t Changed

The bottleneck is still the same. Being able to write more words, deliver more features, or lines of code, will never remove the real bottleneck: real-world results.

A comedian that tells more jokes than another comedian isn’t a better comedian. The better comedian is the one who gets more frequent and better laughs out of the audience.

Delivering a feature is like telling a joke. Your joke doesn’t matter unless it makes people laugh.

The bottleneck is still the same: are you able to make people laugh?

Most people work at companies that ship shitty features and they will just ship more shitty features. There will just be🎵🎵 Feature Diarrhea Cha Cha Cha🎵🎵.

How good are you at connecting the dots between the features you’re shipping and the real-world results you’re trying to produce for your users, customers, and the business?

Don’t confuse your ability to ship features with your ability to deliver value. Just like my writing speed is not the bottleneck for my ability to write a best-selling novel.

If you don’t know how to slowly ship features that make a difference, then you won’t be able to do it quickly. Shipping more features won’t make a difference, in fact it will slow you down even more.

Focus on less but better before you go speedrunning based on the belief that more is better.

Ship faster and ship less. Spend more time on reworking and leveling up what you’ve shipped until it’s great.

That’s the real bottleneck, not the shipping itself. Make your audience laugh and rework those jokes.

Don’t tell more jokes, tell better jokes.