The Math Doesn't Work Anymore AI coding tools have made writing code dramatically faster. Output per engineer has jumped roughly 60% year over year. Feature branch throughput grew 59% in the largest measured jump ever recorded, according to CircleCI data across 28 million CI workflow runs. But here's what nobody adjusted for: review capacity stayed completely flat. Teams are still reviewing code the same way they did when writing was the bottleneck — one PR at a time, squeezed between meetings, feature work, and production incidents. The median PR cycle time across engineering teams is 4.2 days. That number was already bad before AI accelerated code output. The Compounding Cost A stale PR isn't just idle time. It triggers a cascade. Developers start new work while waiting for review. Work in progress accumulates. Context switching increases. Research from 2025-2026 shows the average developer experiences 12 to 15 major context switches per day, costing over 4.5 hours of lost deep focus.…