There are so many elements to this. I've worked in nearly every part of software orgs. Development, ops, professional services, pre-sales. There are bottlenecks everywhere. Faster shipping gets you nothing if your customers procurement budgets don't increase and they're not buying anything. You can wow new customers and lure them in with shit you get out the door super quick that appears to work but falls flat after six months of usage, but you damage your reputation in the long run. So how do you guarantee your software will actually work after six months of usage? You have to test it by running it yourself for six months. There is no other way. No automated suite can exercise every single possible customer use case over a long period of time. It's a combinatorial problem.

Just yesterday I was in a meeting with a customer asking if we could make our FOSS virtualization platform work such that if you yank the root disk out of a server and put it in another one, everything will work with no hiccups. Well, provided it's exactly the same model and you're going to put it on the same network with all the same IP assignments, you've got a shot. I've actually tried to do this before for the hell of it and I only needed to account for the MAC addresses of the NICs being different, as long as you have no other drives and everything else is exactly the same. I'm sure I could whip up something that scans for the predictable interface name and changes the old MAC stored in the NetworkManager configuration files (and wherever else they might happen to be) and change them to the newly discovered one before making a DHCP request, and maybe that will work, but how certain can I really be? I can test on servers I have and I don't have every possible combination of data center equipment all of our customers have. There is no feasible way to test every possibility. Having an LLM whip up the code for me instead of writing it myself doesn't change that.

Ironically enough, that customer is making software for another customer and their own requirement is that it has to run on very hardware on an airplane, which they don't have. So they're working on little NUC clusters in their cubes and at their houses instead, because their company doesn't have extra true server racks for them to use and no budget to acquire them, which probably won't change any time soon given the spike in hardware prices. They're all using AI but what good is it doing? They're spinning their wheels because they're targeting a runtime environment that doesn't exist that they can't test on.

It's a weird folly of the Internet age that the largest companies in the software world are all web companies. Mostly, they're media companies in disguise. Their only real product is human attention and they sell it to advertisers. Tech is just the vehicle that allows them to deliver it. We've valorized their "ship as fast as possible" ethic, which maybe matters, maybe doesn't, but it was never the source of their value. Nobody spends ad money on Facebook and Google because of the quality or delivery speed of their software. It's the human users and data they've captured, which to be clear, software plays a huge role in, but it's not a model all software companies can follow. We don't earn revenue from half braindead doomscrollers wasting most of their day with a background drip of vaguely dopamine-boosting noise blasting into their senses while they leak every fact about their lives to media companies. Our customers have to make intentional decisions to spend money out of finite budgets.

There's another story on the frontpage right now of Coinbase laying off a bunch of its employees and using AI to write more code. Okay, great, but the best that can do is reduce labor expense. They only earn more revenue if consumers decide they want to buy more Crypto and hold it in Coinbase. If Coinbase is using AI to write their software, so is everyone else, so that doesn't give them any kind of edge on quality or shipping speed. Their success is going to be determined overwhelmingly by whether or not people want to buy crypto, a broad market trend completely out of their control. No one in any business ever wants to admit this, but we're all at the mercy of these broader trends.

People are all over this thread citing Ford. Ford didn't decline because they couldn't ship fast enough. They declined because the market stopped wanting what they were making except their full-size pickups, and it's largely just Americans that want that. I don't blame them or think they did anything wrong exactly. People love to do these post-mortems contemplating a world in which someone like Ford accurately predicts every single shift in consumer sentiment that will ever happens and always stays ahead of the curve. It'll never happen. Everything that goes into style eventually goes out of style, and your ability to ship out of style shit faster won't help you.

You said you work for a bank and I'm honestly curious. What causes a customer to choose your bank over another? Do you think it has anything to do with software features? I'm lucky I even got a meeting with the customer I was with yesterday. He told me he loves our product and fought hard for it over a chief architect who wanted something else and made them do a long comparison study to prove our product met their needs better. Why did that chief architect prefer the other product? He plays golf with their CTO.