By Adam McDaniel
Publication Date: 2026-11-06 00:00:00
The first lever sits with developers. As AI-assisted development becomes more capable, the developer’s role expands from writing code to specifying, delegating, supervising and validating work.
Treat cost as an engineering constraint
Everyday work with AI carries economic consequences. Cost has become another engineering constraint, alongside performance, reliability and maintainability. The goal isn’t to minimize AI usage, which often pushes work into unmanaged tools, but to maximize the value created by each AI-assisted task.
How this looks in IBM Bob:
- Context window breakdown: A live view of how the context window is composed, with its Bobcoin impact
- Bobalytics: Adoption, Bob Factor (the share of committed code produced by Bob) and Bobcoin consumption across workspaces, teams and users
Specify before implementing, supervise while delegating
Clear requirements and acceptance criteria reduce unnecessary iterations. Reviewing an execution plan before implementation…
