Bottleneck
Also called Theory of constraints
The one stage that limits how much the whole line can do. Speeding up any other stage changes nothing at the end, and just makes a bigger pile in front of the narrow part.
Agents make writing code far faster, so for many teams the bottleneck has moved to reading it. Generating twice as many pull requests against the same review capacity gets you a longer queue, and pressure to approve without reading. Find the narrow stage before you buy speed anywhere else.
Say it to your agent
“Before you speed up the build, take the last 20 merged pull requests from gh pr list --state merged --json createdAt,mergedAt and tell me where each one waited longest: CI, review or merge. Work only on the longest wait.”