I look forward to the day when the broader industry realizes code was never a bottleneck, and you still have to answer to the market to make money.

This piece, while valid, puts way too much emphasis on code. I don’t want to dismiss the author, but they’ve yet to see how little of a shit the business gives about code. This has been perennial.

Some development houses have always done sketches, proof of concepts or prototypes. Not because code was expensive or inmalleable, but because they didn’t know what would be a success. Even if it did not take forever to build the thing. If I told you what the perfect product was and how to make a boatload of money, you’d be ready with an army of programmers. But life and business rarely work out that way.

So you've NEVER had a sketch, proof of concept or prototype end up being a part of the final product? Now you're stuck with a piece of crap that was implemented expecting to be thrown away, but then because of time and money constraints it's now a load-bearing (heh) part of the application.

It also takes more time for humans to build prototypes and PoCs than doing the same with an agent. Iteration speed and time-to-market matters more and more (case in point: mobile games).