Two weeks into February, most of our developers had already consumed ~85% of their monthly AI premium request quota.

Not because we were behind.

Because we were moving too fast.

Agentic code generation didn’t just speed up feature work — it exposed something deeper: the traditional backlog model assumes development is the constraint. That assumption is breaking.

Backlogs exist to ration scarce engineering time. They prioritize what gets built when execution capacity is limited.

But what happens when execution stops being scarce?

Features that once required weeks now take hours. Entire workflows can be scaffolded, tested, and deployed before a sprint review would have even started. Tasks that once felt meaningful now feel like changing button text.

The bottleneck is shifting.

From:

• Can we build it?

To:

• Should we build it?
• Does it matter?
• Will it move the business?

Teams won’t disappear into endless feature queues. They’ll build production-ready POCs to test viability. Experimentation replaces accumulation. Backlogs become validation pipelines.

History has seen this before.

The steam engine multiplied production capacity, but it didn’t solve distribution, logistics, or market demand. The constraint moved. Supply was no longer the issue — coordination and insight were.

The internal combustion engine didn’t merely make machines faster. It reshaped infrastructure, mobility, and entire industries. Power became embedded, mobile, strategic.

LLMs feel like the steam engine moment in software.

They are extraordinary pattern predictors. They accelerate output. They compress execution time.

But they are still bounded — stateless, context-limited, probabilistic.

The next phase will require something more durable: world models.

Persistent representations of systems. Long-range dependency tracking. Causal reasoning across codebases and business logic. State that survives beyond a prompt window.

That transition — from generation to understanding — will mirror steam giving way to internal combustion.

And when that happens, backlog management as we know it becomes secondary.

Speed won’t define advantage.

Judgment will.

In a world where building is trivial, discernment becomes the scarce resource.