A strange thing happens in organizations that introduce AI agents: the faster the AI gets, the more work piles up at the humans.
Faros AI's 2025 study of 10,000+ developers across 1,255 enterprise engineering teams reported that teams with high AI adoption completed 21% more tasks [[ne:faros2025_task_completion_21pct]] and merged 98% more pull requests [[ne:faros2025_pr_increase_98pct]] — while review times rose 91% [[ne:faros2025_review_wait_91pct]], bug rates rose 9%, and DORA metrics remained largely unchanged. The faster the AI ships, the further the human review falls behind. This pattern reproduces across many organizations.
The bottleneck that can't be removed, and the parts that can
Anyone running AI agents will eventually hit the same observation: "the human is the bottleneck."
You cannot fully remove this. As long as design intent originates from a human, the bottleneck is structural. "Make the AI smarter" doesn't solve it.
