The Final Bottleneck

AI-assisted coding has inverted the traditional bottleneck: code generation now outpaces review capacity, creating unsustainable backlogs in open source projects and engineering teams. Drawing parallels to the Industrial Revolution's textile industry and queue theory, the piece argues that faster code creation without corresponding review capacity leads to system breakdown. The fundamental constraint remains human accountability—machines can't be held responsible for code they generate, so humans must understand and approve everything, making them the permanent bottleneck regardless of AI capabilities.