The bottleneck is the bottleneck — and it's getting worse

A recent post on Stack Overflow's blog points out something most engineers already know: AI is no longer the bottleneck. The real constraint is the prompt itself — the text you feed it — and that's what's slowing everything down.

The piece walks through how prompt engineering has become its own discipline. It's not just about writing better instructions. It's about context length, token budgets, temperature settings, and the hidden cost of round trips to the API. Every call costs money and time. Every extra token in the prompt eats into your context window. The result is a new kind of development work where the bottleneck isn't compute — it's the human ability to structure the request.

This matters because a lot of the AI hype is built on the idea that the technology itself is the hard part. In practice, the hard part is what you ask it to do, and how you ask. The tools are getting more capable, but the prompts are getting longer, more complex, and more expensive. Teams that figured this out early are already writing internal libraries to manage prompt templates, cache responses, and batch requests. Teams that didn't are burning tokens on half-baked prompts that barely work.

The real bottleneck is the bottleneck — and it's getting worse. That's why the people making money in this space aren't just building models. They're building the plumbing around them.

Why this matters for us: The side hustle that turns a prompt into a real product isn't the code — it's the prompt, and the people who know how to write one are the ones getting paid.