The thing nobody told me about agentic coding speeding up by 5x is that your bottleneck just moves. Code lands faster, sure. But now the PM is the slow part of the loop. The QA pass is the slow part of the loop. The "wait, is this what we actually wanted" conversation that used to take a day now takes four days, because you can ship three iterations in the time it takes to confirm what one of them was supposed to do. I run a small development shop in Tokyo. We do contract work for a handful of companies, and every one of them wants more shipping velocity than they have headcount for. About eighteen months ago I started taking AI coding seriously as a way to scale our own capacity. The Claude API plus a decent agent runner could plausibly make us much faster. So I started using it on real work, and within a few weeks the experience had a shape I didn't expect: the agent was great. The chain leading up to and following the agent was the problem.…