phillipclapham

This is the most important point in the thread. The study measures code complexity but the REAL bottleneck is cognitive load (and drain) on the reviewer.

I've been doing 10-12 hour days paired with Claude for months. The velocity gains are absolutely real, I am shipping things I would have never attempted solo before AI and shipping them faster then ever. BUT the cognitive cost of reviewing AI output is significantly higher than reviewing human code. It's verbose, plausible-looking, and wrong in ways that require sustained deep attention to catch.

The study found "transient velocity increase" followed by "persistent complexity increase." That matches exactly. The speed feels incredible at first, then the review burden compounds and you're spending more time verifying than you saved generating.

The fix isn't "apply traditional methods" — it's recognizing that AI shifts the bottleneck from production to verification, and that verification under sustained cognitive load degrades in ways nobody's measuring yet. I think I've found some fixes to help me personally with this and for me velocity is still high, but only time will tell if this remains true for long.