Without AI, both writing and reading code are bottlenecks.

How many times have you reviewed your old code and been appalled at the terrible quality? You personally created slop; it's no different from GenAI output except that a human had to spend precious time crafting it. You likely were indeed bottlenecked by your ability to churn out code that you just had to get to work, for one reason or another.

The real issue is in the asymmetry when one party can use automation to create more code than another party can possibly manually verify.