alt Hacker NewsI answered this in a different comment below, but a lot of the friction is around the amount of time it takes to test/review/submit etc, and a lot of this is centered around tooling that no one has had the time to improve, perf problems in clunky processes that have been around longer than anyone individual, and other things of this nature. Addressing these issues is now approachable and doable in one's "spare time".
The point of that friction is to keep the human in the loop wrt code quality, it's not meant to be meaningless busywork. It's difficult to believe that you sustain the benefit of those systems. Anthropic and Microsoft publicly failed to keep up code quality. They would probably be in a better spot currently if they used neither, no friction, no AI. But that friction exists for a reason and AI doesn't have the "context length" to benefit from it.
This the the difference between intentional and incidental friction, if your CI/CD pipeline is bad it should be improved not sidestepped. The first step in large projects is paving over the lower layer so that all that incidental friction, the kind AI can help with, is removed. If you are constantly going outside that paved area, sure AI will help, but not with the success of the project which is more contingent on the fact that you've failed to lay the groundwork correctly.