Agentic Software Development Created New Friction Points—Where to Find Them, How to Fix Them

AI is making software development faster than ever — but speed without alignment just moves the slowdown somewhere else. AppDirect's SVP of Engineering and Technology identifies the four friction points that emerge when coding gets cheap, explains why three already have practical solutions teams can act on today, and maps out where the real frontier lies. A clear-eyed read for engineering leaders, business executives, and anyone trying to get more out of their AI investment. Over the past year, our engineering teams have been adopting agentic development at real scale. The surprising part wasn’t that engineers could produce more code. We expected that. The surprising part was where the friction moved. For decades, one of the major constraints in software engineering was writing code. AI has started changing that. If you’ve adopted agentic development at any meaningful scale, you’ve probably seen the first half of this story already: output goes up. More PRs merge. The same engineer can ship much more than before. That gain is real. But the work doesn’t become frictionless. The friction relocates. Bottlenecks don’t disappear. They move. And when coding gets faster, the drag tends to pile up on either side of it: before the…