AI coding assistants are boosting developer productivity, but most enterprises aren’t shipping software any faster. GitLab CEO Bill Staples says the reason is simple: coding was never the main bottleneck. After speaking with more than 60 customers, Staples found that developers spend only 10–20% of their time writing code. The remaining 80–90% is consumed by reviews, CI/CD pipelines, security scans, compliance checks, and deployment—areas that remain largely unautomated. Faster code generation only worsens downstream queues.