Amdahl's Law and Agentic Coding

7 days ago

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Amdahl’s law states that the speedup from optimizing part of a system is limited by that part's share of the total runtime.
Example: Reducing vegetable prep time from 15 to 1 minute only cuts total cooking time by 23% because roasting dominates.
AI coding tools speed up code writing, but other parts of the development lifecycle (e.g., planning, testing, deploying) become bottlenecks.
Agentic coding exposes underinvestment in developer tooling, making slow builds, CI systems, and code reviews more painful.
Solutions include evolving the software development lifecycle with AI and investing in tooling to address new bottlenecks.

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