If you thought the speed of writing code was your problem – you have bigger problems | Debugging Leadership | Debugging Leadership
March 18, 2026
The core idea is the Theory of Constraints, and it goes like this:
Every system has exactly one constraint. One bottleneck. The throughput of your entire system is determined by the throughput of that bottleneck. Nothing else matters until you fix the bottleneck.
I think the challenge with Andrew Murphy’s very thoughtful piece here, and he’s someone with an immense amount of engineering and leadership experience is, as with a piece earlier today that we quoted, that he’s analysing an existing system, identifying one aspect of it, code generation, and reasoning about what happens if that changes but nothing else does.
But, large language models and agentic systems are not simply increasing the cadence of code generation. They’re impacting all of the software development lifecycle. so it makes a much more complex system that we’re trying to reason about.
