CONCEPT
The Evaluation Bottleneck
The structural choke-point produced when AI-generated outputs converge on the manager's capacity for judgment — a bottleneck that is not a temporary inefficiency but the inevitable consequence of deploying machine-speed production into a system governed at human speed.
When a team of five engineers using Claude Code generates in a day the volume of code that previously took a week, the code requires architectural review, product evaluation, and integration testing — all of which flow upward to the manager. The production has been accelerated. The evaluation has not. The asymmetry between the speed of production and the speed of evaluation is the specific bottleneck AI creates in the managerial role, and the bottleneck is the manager herself. Evaluation is, in many ways, more cognitively demanding than the production it replaces. Production gives you a warm-up; you engage with the material, work through the logic, build understanding as you build the artifact. Evaluation asks you to exercise judgment on something you did not build, whose logic you must reconstruct, whose assumptions you must surface, and whose errors you must catch without the benefit of having been present for the process that produced them.
