​Before Scaling AI Coding Tools, Find Your Engineering Bottleneck

Illia Smoliienko is the founder of Sivense and an expert with over a decade of experience in industrial IoT and predictive maintenance.

​AI has done exactly what was expected: Code has started appearing faster. However, code is the output of a single stage, whereas a team’s result is a feature that has reached production and delivered value. Speeding up the former doesn’t guarantee the latter.

This is where the core management problem arises. A manager might see more code, tasks and pull requests and then conclude that AI has boosted productivity. However, these metrics still don’t answer two questions: Has the stage that truly held the team back actually sped up? Has the outcome for the user or the business changed?

I’ll break down why higher output doesn’t always lead to an outcome and how managers can find their bottlenecks before scaling tools across the whole team.

Which Part Of Developers’ Work AI Has Sped Up

When Fred Brooks analyzed candidates for the role of a “silver bullet” for development in 1987, AI was already among them. Brooks didn’t deny AI’s usefulness, but he doubted it could radically increase development productivity and software quality. He explained that “the hard thing about building software is deciding what one wants to say, not saying it.” Speeding up expression itself doesn’t remove the main difficulty and yields only a marginal gain.

Forty years later, we have a tool that speeds up expression. What results has it brought us?

According to a 2025 report published by DORA, Google Cloud’s research program, over 80% of surveyed technology professionals believed AI made them more productive. For writing code, however, this productivity has a flip side: The time saved on creating code is spent reviewing it.

A developer generates a large piece of code in minutes, but the engineer reviewing it works at the same pace as before. One person’s gain becomes another’s burden. As one respondent put it: “I feel somewhat more productive, but it’s at a cost.”