If your A+ senior developer spends 8 months working on a feature that ultimately doesn’t get shipped or a MVP that gets killed, then you wasted that A+ senior developer and their productivity was the same as the other two B+ engineers that also worked on the project. This is actually a very common issue and usually ignored when it comes to things like hiring or assigning resources to a project. AI won’t change that in a meaningful way, your team may just finish their tasks a lot faster but the bureaucratic layer above will likely remain the same, which will make any AI coding gains negligible. Companies would have to be rebuilt from the top down for AI and that’s very unlikely to happen.
I think engineers tend to over index on this kind of thing being "waste". You didn't waste that investment, you paid for the option to ship that feature or MVP and the research into the question of whether it made sense to ship it.
put simpler, you learned what not to build.
It's definitely that, which is very valuable, but it's also the optionality value additionally. You had the option to launch the thing, which you wouldn't have had if you had never worked on it at all. It's notoriously difficult to properly value optionality, but it definitely has value, and often a lot of value.
Shouldn't companies figure this out before wasting tens of millions in budget + working hours? All I'm reading is that corporations are not taxed enough if they are okay with such opulent waste.
Knowing what to build (and that it hasn't already been built or bought elsewhere in the company) requires bits of information / person-to-person networking / visibility into the state of the company that not all managers or VPs have.
In fact, most people don't have that knowledge, because they're busy with existing or "local" problems , or because they didn't know to ask Davis the DBA or Kris the Kafka Cluster Manger or Alex from accounting if we have <resource> our team can plug into and use. "Oh, yeah, El has one under their desk they kick occasionally, ask them to hook you up!"
If you solve this problem in a turnkey way Fortune 500 companies will write you very large checks to help them prevent such duplicate waste, and will in turn become the 15th system they need to integrate....
That XKCD joke about "how 14 standards becomes 15 standards" also applies to the class of "one system to integrate with and report from all other systems"