Amdahl's Law for LLM generated code
4 comments
Never mind, someone else already made this point: https://electric.ax/blog/2026/02/19/amdahls-law-for-ai-agent...
Thank you! This changed how I was thinking about my product: a knowledge harness for coding agents. While I was discussing incidents & context-switching tax, the structural compounding is likely the real win.
Yep. AI is a freeway. But there is still bumper traffic in the city at the end of it.
Or like your 1 hour flight has 1 hour to check in etc.
Or like your 1 hour flight has 1 hour to check in etc.
so cool
But for any important code the only way to know that it's correct is to hand-audit every line, which is harder than writing every line because this allows you to build a conceptual hierarchy and model within which you can think about the code.
So there's a fundamental limit to the speedup from LLMs when writing anything you care about.
(The main objection will be what about when you have a human engineer working on your behalf. But this is a distraction: sometimes you can fully trust an engineer, which is not at all true for LLMs.)