Originally written in French. Translated by AI — the meaning has been preserved, not the prose.
Main idea
The volume of code produced and a system's whole-system properties do not move together. Architectural coherence, reliability in operation, security and the quality of integrations are not quantities you obtain by writing more: they are properties of the whole, and they degrade whenever parts are added without arbitration.
So the technical question that matters shifts. "Can we code this?" becomes an ordinary question as soon as production is abundant; the questions that stay hard lie elsewhere — can we integrate it cleanly into what already exists, can we maintain it, can we secure it, can we make it hold up in the real world.
What the technical team contributes is no longer primarily the capacity to write, it is the judgment of what it is reasonable, robust and sustainable to build in a given context.
Layer added by "PM, Developers, and AI: Roles Are Blurring, Responsibilities Remain" (2026-08-01). The most useful framing runs through what becomes a commodity and what does not. Quickly producing a first version of code stops being rare; the software itself does not become a commodity, and neither does engineering, architecture, security or maintainability. Conflating the two leads to treating as ordinary a craft of which only the first step has become ordinary.
Why it matters
It stops you reading an acceleration in production as a technical lead. A system that grows faster than it is arbitrated accumulates architectural debt at the very pace of its growth.
It also supplies the criterion for judging a technical proposal once feasibility is settled: integration, maintainability, security and operational robustness, the four places where the real cost surfaces.
Nuances and limits
The claim does not say that production no longer counts: a team unable to ship arbitrates nothing. It says that the capacity to write stops being the limiting factor.
And part of the coherence can be tooled — enforced conventions, tests, automated reviews — which shifts the judgment toward defining those guardrails without removing it.
Open questions
- How do you measure the degradation of a system's coherence while it grows, before it shows up as incidents?