The exoskeleton framing is useful but incomplete. In my experience, AI coding assistants are most valuable not when they write code, but when they search for existing solutions before writing code.
The real waste isn't developers typing slowly — it's developers spending a week building an auth system that already exists as a well-maintained library, or reimplementing invoicing logic that someone else has already debugged through 200 edge cases.
The gap right now is structured discovery. AI assistants are great at generating code but terrible at knowing what already exists. There's no equivalent of "have you checked if someone already solved this?" built into the workflow. That's where the actual leverage is — preventing unnecessary work, not just accelerating it.
The real waste isn't developers typing slowly — it's developers spending a week building an auth system that already exists as a well-maintained library, or reimplementing invoicing logic that someone else has already debugged through 200 edge cases.
The gap right now is structured discovery. AI assistants are great at generating code but terrible at knowing what already exists. There's no equivalent of "have you checked if someone already solved this?" built into the workflow. That's where the actual leverage is — preventing unnecessary work, not just accelerating it.