My impression has always been it's more important the build the correct thing (what the customer needs/wants) rather than more stuff faster.
The difference is all that pre-work. The problem with that is some things are only obvious after you've built one and it doesn't fit just right for some reason. That reason is impossibly harder to just reason about and figure out vs iterating where possible. For software things that's easier. For hardware, we have stories like the palm pilot engineer having a wooden block with them for a week before deciding on the form factor for it. Such pre-work is valuable, but if the cost of prototypes is way down, you can afford to iterate instead of trying to psychically predict everything up front. Of course that doesn't work for eg trips to the Moon, but most busineeses aren't doing that.
When prototypes are harder to build you focus on answering the biggest questions. I feel like you spend more time iterating on details in CAD, even when the larger idea is invalid.
But people who have only wrote software their entire life wouldn’t know that would they?
It’s like the econ prof’s who theorise about the theory of the firm but have never done it themselves.
The process of learning what the customer needs/wants is a heavily iterative one, often involving throwing prototypes at them or betting at a solution, then course-correcting based on their reaction. Similarly, the process of building the correct thing is almost always an iterative approximation - correctness is something you discover and arrive at after research and prototypes and trying and getting it wrong.
All of that benefits from any of its steps being done faster - but it's up to the org/team whether they translate this speedup to quality or velocity. For example, if AI lets you knock out prototypes and hypothesis-testing scripts much faster, you can choose whether to finish earlier (and start work on next thing sooner), or do more thorough research, test more hypothesis, and finish as normally, but with better result.
(Well, at least theoretically. If you're under competitive pressure, the usual market dynamics will take the choice away, but that's another topic.)
why do you think restaurants rarely change their menus.
Also, give it time. Real adoption in boring companies started Q1. Q2 is, I think, this settling in and people learning how to do their work and manage their responsibilities. Q3/Q4 will be the time when I expect to start seeing higher velocities across all IT-adjacent products I use.
