The points brought up are all great. I'm in a lower management position and I've wondered for a decade why the budget, cost, and return on work (i.e. revenue) were never divulged or connected to the work at hand. So kudos for facing that problem bluntly in language that's easy to follow. The place I'm at currently, its much more about automating away processes and making back office operations easier, so there's likely a lot of direct cost savings that we could measure, but don't.

Here's the problem I see with how this particular article is moving though: the context of these projects are often highly technical connecting back to the human problem space. Developers sit on the technical end but they also usually have a mental model for how it connects back to the non-technical. A product manager is another addition to compensate for the user connection. Between all of these folks they can only hold so much in their head about the problem space on a day-to-day basis. And that headspace for the problem is what is critical. Management wants to try a new idea for sales? They need to take it to the team with that problem space to translate it into working code. Even with the assistance of agents, one needs to hold the important patterns in their head. And my company certainly isn't going to vibe code its way through anything regulatory, mistakes there might cost us a ton in fees and bad PR. Hell I've seen product managers sweat over the possibility of getting a few 1 star reviews on the app store.

Anyway, you still need people with context to break things down and get them out the door, the agents can just assist with the speed of the In Progress stage. And clever teams can figure out how to automate their validation (but they could already do that).

Rockstar developers often seem to be the ones who can parachute in, gain context, make changes, and leave to find another problem space. They get bogged down when they've visited 10 or more problem spaces and then they start getting called back into service. Again the agents don't change any of that, the human involved has a finite capacity for context.

Teams who structure around maintaining context might be best suited for the new world of code.