Scale the Judgment, Not the Model — Andrew Orobator, Reddit
The AI bottleneck is codified judgment around models, not model capability itself
“Replace the model with a smarter one. You will get a slightly better answer. Now take away the tests, inspections, reviews, and it all falls apart. So the model was never really a bottleneck. The bottleneck is the judgment around the model.”
Reddit Android engineer Andrew Orobator argues that the real bottleneck in AI-assisted coding is not model capability but the explicit codification of engineering judgment — the accumulated knowledge from code reviews, postmortems, and institutional experience. Unlike humans who absorb judgment implicitly through mentorship and incidents, agents require every decision criterion to be expressed explicitly or they simply won't have it. The insight reframes the engineer's role in an AI-native world: from writing code to building the verification infrastructure and judgment systems that make AI output trustworthy.