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There is some truth to this, but in practice I'm finding that yes, removing the writing code bottleneck has improved throughput quite a bit.

My day (excluding the huge amounts of communication overhead) used to progress as a serial operation of: 1. Write some code for one thing, 2. Self review of that thing, 3. Review other peoples' work, 4. Respond to review comments, 5. Get things merged, 6. Back to 1.

Now I have more of a tendency to queue up work on a few things at once, and then the serial steps are the self reviews and reviews of other peoples' work, and some of the review commentary back and forth (though I can automate some of this in parallel as well).

The upshot is that I'm more working in batches now than in serial, which I really do find to be more efficient.

It's not that it has removed all the bottlenecks at all, but no longer being required to focus all my attention for periods of time on physically typing code has removed one important bottleneck, and has changed, and I would say, improved, my workflow significantly.

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One thing the AI tools have taught me is that it hasn't been my personal bottleneck for at least a very long time. It's made that part faster for me, and that allows me to take bigger bites at the apple each iteration, but it's not meaningfully speeding me up in the way people claim.
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I disagree that it's not meaningfully speeding me up. I'm definitely doing a lot more, and more quickly. But the benefit is definitely smaller at the team and organization level, because we still have all the same serialization points - review, validation, decision making - downstream of my work.
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I realized after I posted that it didn't quite capture what I meant. For instance if I'm able to do a more complex piece of work all at once in about the same amount of time as it'd previously take me to do a simpler piece of work, than that is a speedup. And that's what I am able to realize.

But what's not as much the case is that if I did an A/B test on the same task that I'd be massively sped up because so much of my day to day work are the things you mentioned as being serialization points. The time I take to figure out what needs doing, what the best approach would be, making sure it was actually the right thing to have done in the first place once I'm done, all that stuff. I use AI assistance for those tasks too but it's not the same effect as when I just hand off the pure implementation phases. So it winds up being "faster" and you'll have to pry my AI assist tools out of my cold, dead fingers - but if I'm being honest with myself by *that* metric it's not a huge gain.

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Yep totally agreed.
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Depends on your company. I'd say very rarely, and never for long.
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