The original title is "AI Didn't Make Your Team Faster. It Moved the Bottleneck."

Short summary

AI-assisted development speeds up coding but doesn't proportionally improve team throughput because the bottleneck moves to review bandwidth or requirements quality. A 2025 study found experienced developers were 19% slower with AI tools while feeling 20% faster, and team-level gains often stayed under 10% despite 30-40% coding speedups. The article applies queuing theory to explain why accelerating a non-constraint stage increases queue size, not delivery speed.

• •Individual coding speed gains don't translate to team throughput — bottlenecks move to review and requirements
• •Experienced devs were 19% slower with AI tools while believing they were 20% faster; juniors gained 10-30%
• •Flow efficiency, not deployment frequency, is the metric that reveals whether AI actually improved delivery

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.