Coding speed stopped being the bottleneck a while ago. Most teams haven't rebuilt their workflow to reflect that. Work still moves through the same sequence of handoffs it always has: PM to design, design to engineering, engineering to QA, each one waiting days for the last one to finish. Dropping an AI coding assistant into that sequence doesn't touch the wait. Developers write code faster. Delivery across the org stays exactly where it was.

This playbook explains why that happens and what changes when a team redesigns the workflow around agents rather than layering AI on top of the old one.