> code output is rarely the reason why projects that I worked on are delayed

This is very true at large enterprises. The pre-coding tasks [0] and the post-coding tasks [1] account for the majority of elapsed time that it takes for a feature to go from inception to production.

The theory of constraints says that optimizations made to a step that's not the bottleneck will only make the actual bottleneck worse.

AI is no match for a well-established bureaucracy.

[0]: architecture reviews, requirements gathering, story-writing

[1]: infrastructure, multiple phases of testing, ops docs, sign-offs