One of the things I've started noticing at work is that for the last few months I was banging away at having multiple streams at a time. But over time, I've reached the point where there is some human blocker on the stream, be it QA to test it, other humans to have attention to pick it up for the next step, deployment of some sort, or in some happy cases, it made it through to deployment and the problem is now solved. In the past couple of weeks my multistreaming is toning down and more often I'm back to one stream of work. Often a much higher level stream than I would have been working at a couple of years ago, and I'm moving faster in a number of ways. Some of that "faster" has been burned up in things like changing environments that I previously just wouldn't have done, though.

Open source has had a QA problem pretty much its entire life... not in the sense that it stinks necessarily, but in that getting it at all is a challenge and was in many projects probably already the blocker to further progress.

One wonders if what is happening here is just that even in the software space, where the fluidity and flexibility is maximized as we work with nearly entirely digital constructs, that once we burn through the dry tinder of "all the stuff we know we needed but didn't have the coding time to get to" and the frontier of "work to do" advance on all fronts to "some sort of human or real-world blocker", it may just turn out that the steady state improvement in productivity after accounting for Amdahl's Law, even when code is "nearly free", is only a maybe 2x or 3x improvement after all. If this is true, goodness help the financial bubble which is assuming that something like 5x or 10x indefinitely is a lower bound, if even in the best possible domain for AI that's all we really get.