202603 – apenwarr
March 18, 2026
We’ve all heard of those network effect laws: the value of a network goes up
with the square of the number of members. Or the cost of communication goes
up with the square of the number of members, or maybe it was n log n, or
something like that, depending how you arrange the members. Anyway doubling
a team doesn’t double its speed; there’s coordination overhead. Exactly how
much overhead depends on how badly you botch the org design.But there’s one rule of thumb that someone showed me decades ago, that has
stuck with me ever since, because of how annoyingly true it is. The rule
is annoying because it doesn’t seem like it should be true. There’s no
theoretical basis for this claim that I’ve ever heard. And yet, every time I
look for it, there it is.Every layer of approval makes a process 10x slower
This detailed essay has at its heart a belief about systems–that each layer of approval makes the process ten times slower.
Now, this may be empirically true, even for software development, but it is contingent. I would say all of this essay would have made sense much more a year ago or even less when we focused on the idea of large language models as code generators but kept everything else about the process of software engineering unchanged.
But it’s not. Quality assurance and verification are increasingly something we can rely on, or that it made it the systems to do. Formal verification techniques, Which have been used for decades, but which have relied on a tiny number of extremely capable experts are becoming increasingly tractable to large language models.
The challenge when new and transformative technologies emerge is not to see their obvious application, but it’s to see their broader application. We’ve focused a lot on code generation with these technologies the last three or four years, but that’s not the only place in the software engineering process that they are already having and will increasingly have an impact.
