The 10x estimate tracks — I've seen it too. The underlying mechanism is queuing theory: each approval step is a single-server queue with high variance inter-arrival times, so average wait explodes non-linearly. AI makes the coding step ~10x faster but doesn't touch the approval queue. The orgs winning right now are the ones treating async review latency as a first-class engineering metric, same way they treat p99 latency for services.