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tuhgdetzhhtoday at 10:43 AM2 repliesview on HN

Yes, and that constraint shows up surprisingly early.

Even if you eliminate model latency and keep yourself fully in sync via a tight human-in-the-loop workflow, the shared mental model of the team still advances at human speed. Code review, design discussion, and trust-building are all bandwidth-limited in ways that do not benefit much from faster generation.

There is also an asymmetry: local flow can be optimized aggressively, but collaboration introduces checkpoints. Reviewers need time to reconstruct intent, not just verify correctness. If the rate of change exceeds the team’s ability to form that understanding, friction increases: longer reviews, more rework, or a tendency to rubber-stamp changes.

This suggests a practical ceiling where individual "power coding" outpaces team coherence. Past that point, gains need to come from improving shared artifacts rather than raw output: clearer commit structure, smaller diffs, stronger invariants, better automated tests, and more explicit design notes. In other words, the limiting factor shifts from generation speed to synchronization quality across humans.


Replies

EdNuttingtoday at 11:03 AM

This thread seems to have re-identified Amdahl’s law in the context of software development workflow.

Agentic coding is only speeding up or parallelising a small part of the workflow - the rest is still sequential and human-driven.

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zozbot234today at 11:42 AM

You can ask the agent to reverse engineer its own design and provide a design document that can inform the code review discussion. Plus, hopefully human code review would only occur after several rounds of the agent refactoring its own one-shot slop into something that's up to near-human standards of surveyability and maintainability.