Denominator: 1-p

The passage around this formula

That framing is worth making precise, because it is a structural claim, not a figure of speech. Let p be the share of a change’s total cycle time that code generation itself used to consume before Claude Code, so (1-p) is the share consumed by review and everything else. If generation alone speeds up by a factor g , total cycle time scales as (1-p) + p/g , and the achievable speed-up in total cycle time is $S(g) = \frac{1}{(1-p) + p/g}, \qquad \lim_{g \to \infty} S(g) = \frac{1}{1-p}$. Amdahl’s law was originally about parallel processors, not engineering teams, but the constraint has the same shape: a serial bottleneck that does not scale caps the benefit of accelerating everything around it, no matter how large g gets. For a team, review is that…

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