Last week, one of our product managers (PMs) built and shipped a feature. Not spec’d it. Not filed a ticket for it. Built it, tested it, and shipped it to production. In a day.A few days earlier, our designer noticed that the visual appearance of our IDE plugins had drifted from the design system. In the old world, that meant screenshots, a JIRA ticket, a conversation to explain the intent, and a sprint slot. Instead, he opened an agent, adjusted the layout himself, experimented, iterated, and tuned in real time, then pushed the fix. The person with the strongest design intuition fixed the design directly. No translation layer required.None of this is new in theory. Vibe coding opened the gates of software creation to millions. That was aspiration. When I shared the data on how our engineers doubled throughput, shifted from coding to validation, brought design upfront for rapid experimentation, it was still an engineering story. What changed is that the theory became practice. Here’s how it actually played out.The bottleneck movedWhen we went AI-first in 2025, implementation cost collapsed. Agents took over scaffolding, tests, and the repetitive glue code that used to eat half the sprint. Cycle times dropped from weeks to days, from days to hours. Engineers started thinking less in files and functions and more in architecture, constraints, and execution plans.But once engineering capacity stopped being the bottleneck, we noticed something: Decision velocity was. All the coordination mechanisms we’d built to protect engineering time (specs, tickets, handoffs, backlog grooming) were now the slowest part of the system. We were optimizing for a constraint that no longer existed.What happens when building is cheaper than coo …
