I was listening to a podcast recently about building agents, and they mentioned that writing code was never the bottleneck; it was everything around code writing that took the most time. So true, I thought. Of course, there’s much more to delivering software to customers, but I’ve always cringed at how much inefficiency exists in a typical build and test setup, and how little effort teams often put into addressing these bottlenecks.
Recently, while testing a new build tool, I noticed that when it worked, it improved my build efficiency by more than 50%. That’s when it struck me how much productivity I had been losing and even more surprisingly, how unaware I’d been of it, simply because I had grown accustomed to those inefficiencies.