Pavan Kumar T V

CTO | Technology Leader

AI Coding Tools: The Real Target Isn't Non-Coders, It's Programmer Salaries

Devin AI and Windsurf get roasted on Twitter. Overhyped demos that disappeared, they say. But look at their enterprise ARR. Strong. The disconnect? Twitter warriors aren't the target.

Everyone talks about these tools democratizing coding, turning non-technical people into developers. That's just marketing. The real play is different. The pie is massive, but it's not about expanding the pool of coders. It's about cutting the biggest fixed cost in any tech company: programmer salaries.

The Broken Baseline

Why are these tools winning in enterprise? Look at what they're replacing. Enterprises have been getting such terrible outcomes from traditional development that these AI tools feel like magic. Not because they're perfect. Because the baseline is so broken.

Here's a typical enterprise project flow:

  1. Requirements collection
  2. PM setting and doing a plan
  3. Architect looking at design
  4. UX doing a Figma
  5. Lead splitting them to FE and BE
  6. FE codes UI
  7. BE does API
  8. Then there is QC
  9. DevOps pipelines
  10. Integration UAT test
  11. And the list goes on...

With AI tools, it's 3 steps:

  1. Cursor plan
  2. Build
  3. Validate and release

Here's what matters: this is non-lossy compression. All those best practices from the 10+ step process? Still there. Requirements, architecture, design, testing, security, performance. Just compressed into the workflow instead of separate coordination layers.

This is why I hate "vibe coding." It throws away the best practices we've built over decades. Testing, code review, architecture, security, performance: these aren't overhead. They're guardrails that prevent disasters. The tools that win preserve all of this while cutting the coordination overhead.

The Compression Effect

This isn't just faster coding. Look at what gets compressed:

  • People (fewer roles, fewer handoffs)
  • Meetings (way less coordination)
  • Time (faster iteration)
  • Traceability (fewer tools)
  • Tooling (simpler stack)

10 people, 10 steps → 3 people, 3 steps. Same quality. That's why enterprises care.

What This Actually Looks Like

The biggest impact isn't turning non-technical people into full-time coders. It's eliminating the context loss from delegation. The person who understands the problem is now the person who solves it. No handoffs. No context lost.

CFA coding his own invoice analysis: Used to be write requirements, wait for a developer, explain the domain logic, review code, iterate. Now? Just codes it directly. No context lost.

QA Engineer fixing her own UI bugs: File a ticket, wait for prioritization, explain the issue, wait for a fix, retest. Or just fix it herself in 10 minutes because she understands the issue better than anyone.

CTO building his own marketing site: Brief a marketing team, hire agencies, coordinate with designers and developers, manage timelines, iterate through feedback. Or just build it himself and ship today.

The context stays with the person who has it. You don't need a dedicated programmer for every use case.

The Hard Part: People Are Wired for Delegation

Delegation ≠ Forwarding a wish to AI.

Here's the problem: people are used to delegation. You write a brief, hand it off, someone else figures it out. That's how we've worked for decades. But that model doesn't work with AI tools.

The problem with delegation isn't the handoff. It's the context loss. When you delegate, the other person doesn't have your context. The edge cases you know intuitively. The business logic that's obvious to you. The constraints that are second nature. All that gets lost.

AI tools don't eliminate the need for context. They eliminate the delegation. That CFA coding invoice analysis? He still needs to understand data structures, business logic, edge cases. The QA engineer? She needs to understand the UI framework, component hierarchy, user flow. The CTO? Vision, messaging, technical constraints.

You can't just tell Cursor what you want and expect magic. You need to change how you work. Stay involved. Provide context. Guide the tool. The difference is you keep the context and do the work yourself, instead of losing it by delegating.

The Real Game

When programmer salaries are your biggest fixed cost, and you can go from 10 people doing 10 steps to 3 people doing 3 steps with non-lossy compression, the math is obvious. This isn't about democratizing coding. It's about eliminating context loss.

The tools that win won't be the ones with the best marketing about empowering non-coders. They'll be the ones that actually compress the dev process while keeping best practices, eliminate context loss from delegation, and cut the total cost without sacrificing quality.

Twitter can debate if these tools are overhyped. Enterprises are running the numbers on programmer salaries and making decisions. The ARR speaks for itself.

That's the real game. And it's just getting started.

Written with Cursor.