Originally published in Temrel, a weekly newsletter on agentic engineering.
You ask an agent to code an update. It takes about 90 seconds to produce the PR. You then spend the next 90 minutes reading it line by line to see if you trust it. You might, whisper it, be shipping code even slower than you were before.
Agent-based development velocity is borrowed time, re-invoiced with interest at review time. The agent writes the PR in seconds; you pay for that speed in the time it takes to decide whether to trust what it has written. This is the Audit Tax.
This is a deliberate sequel to last week's "Stop prompting, start looping." Verification was one of our six dials, and today we focus on that one.
The bottleneck moved while you were watching the leaderboard
