This mirrors exactly what we learned from outsourcing over the past two decades. The successful teams weren’t those with the best offshore developers - they were the ones who mastered writing unambiguous specifications.

AI coding has the same bottleneck: specification quality. The difference is that with outsourcing, poor specs meant waiting weeks for the wrong thing. With AI, poor specs mean iterating indefinitely on the wrong thing.

The irony is that AI is excellent at helping refine specifications - identifying ambiguities, expanding requirements, removing assumptions. The specification effectively IS the code, just in human language instead of syntax.

Teams that struggled with distributed development are repeating the same mistakes with AI. Those who learned specification discipline are thriving because they understand that clear requirements determine quality output, regardless of the implementer.

Makes me wonder if leadership will bounce back from vibe coding faster than it did from outsourcing?

I wasn't around then but colleagues told me it took years for leadership to understand what's happening and to turn the ship around.