Pattern: The Last Slow Thing — Requirements Understanding Is the One Bottleneck AI Hasn't Touched

paddo.dev·medium signal

paddo.dev argues (May 30) that AI accelerated every software stage — coding, review, deployment — except discovering what customers actually need. Forward-deployed engineer postings at AI labs jumped 800% across 2025 with $300K-$600K salary ranges; Google hired hundreds and Anthropic/OpenAI built dedicated services teams. The data point: approximately 95% of enterprise AI pilots produced no measurable impact — not from weak models, but from misalignment between capability and business needs. The implication for builders: the skill now valued most isn't typing speed but listening, and that bottleneck runs at exactly the speed it ran twenty years ago.