Last week, the focus was on looms. This week, it’s potato chips. The author is a big fan of EconTalk, a podcast hosted by Russ Roberts. One of their favorite episodes features Brendan O’Donohoe discussing how potato chips are made. It might sound dull, but it’s surprisingly fascinating. O’Donohoe is both an expert and an enthusiast, offering insights into how the production process has become more efficient over time.

Learning from Potato Chips to Improve Software

The main idea is that making potato chips has improved by identifying and fixing bottlenecks in the process. Initially, they find what’s slowing things down most, fix that step, and then move on to the next bottleneck. This cycle continues until the process is so optimized that further improvements become marginal. The author realized that software development is similar. To make it better, you need to find the bottleneck, address it, and repeat.

In software, the coding phase is often the bottleneck. It’s the high-pressure step that determines how quickly a project moves forward. If the coding process becomes faster or more automated, then the bottleneck shifts or disappears. This idea leads to a surprising conclusion: what if writing code is no longer the slowest part of development?

The Rise of Agentic Coding and Its Impact

Assuming that automated coding tools, or “agentic coding,” make writing code happen over days or weeks instead of months or years, what changes? First, requirements will need to be much clearer. Currently, developers accept vague requirements, trusting that they can refine and figure things out as they go. But with automation, vague inputs will produce vague outputs. Garbage in, garbage out, as the saying goes.

Because of this, teams will have to become expert at giving precise, detailed instructions to their coding agents. This might even be called “coding in English,” where the focus is on clear communication rather than traditional programming. As a result, a lot more software will be created. Some of it will be good, some less so. Many ideas for new features or applications are probably not built today because the coding process is too costly or complex. Automation could lower those barriers significantly.

This shift will likely lead to an explosion of software projects, some of which might be “easy to execute” but not necessarily high quality. The landscape of software development could change dramatically, with rapid prototyping and iteration becoming the norm. It’s an exciting possibility that automation could free developers from the slow, painstaking coding stage and open up new opportunities for innovation.

Ultimately, if coding becomes less of a bottleneck, the focus will shift to designing better requirements, user experience, and strategic planning. Automation doesn’t eliminate the need for human oversight but transforms the role of developers from code writers to problem solvers and decision makers. The future of software development might be less about typing lines of code and more about defining what needs to be built.

Inspired by

• https://www.infoworld.com/article/4116373/when-writing-code-is-no-longer-the-bottleneck.html

Sources

• econtalk.org
• russroberts.info
• econtalk.org
• wikipedia.org