Slow developer experience will bottleneck fast models

Right now developer experience is measured in seconds. If your tests take a second to run, that’s good; if they take thirty seconds, that’s bad. Any faster than a second doesn’t really matter, because most of your time is spent either thinking or waiting for an AI agent to spin. Shaving milliseconds off your dev server reload time or whatever is pointless: that’s not the bottleneck. It will be. Small models are getting faster and faster, and smart models are getting smaller. I think most engineers will still want to use the smartest available model — software engineering is hard — but we will increasingly see faster models get used as subagents or for well-understood tasks. This is largely uncharted territory. Very few people have developed intuitions for what it is going to be like to work with agents that run at thousands of tokens-per-second. GPT-6-Astra can run at about sixty tokens per second. That means you spend a lot of time waiting for it to think. You work with it like you…