The first wave of AI coding tools made the developer faster but remain heavily in the loop. Copilor and Cursor's tab autocomplete are prime examples However, the workflow was still heavily centered around and bottlenecked by the developer's local workflow: a developer in an IDE, watching the model, accepting or rejecting changes, and pushing code one interaction at a time.
Framing Copilot and Cursor's autocomplete as 'wave 1' that merely accelerated the existing bottleneck reframes the narrative: these tools didn't change the fundamental unit of work (developer attention), they just made it faster. The real disruption is removing developer attention as the rate-limiting step entirely.