The headcount spreadsheet says we can fire ninety percent of the developers because an AI coding agent writes ten times more code and appears in the budget as a software subscription. The arithmetic is impeccable.

Remember the promise of firing the testers because DevOps? Automating their tasks was supposed to make the job disappear. That didn't happen.

Eliyahu Goldratt's Theory of Constraints helps us follow where that extra work goes by finding the step holding everything else up. Pass coding to agents and the work piles up in review. Once agents do the reviewing too, the bottleneck moves again. Finding that bottleneck will tell us where we need the developers we were about to fire and what their job is going to look like.

Baruch has been running that experiment on the open-source project, with agents doing the work and one human (barely) in the room. We'll trace the project's history to see what kept waiting after coding and review went to agents. You'll learn how to find the constraint in your own team's work and act on it, with examples of limiting work in progress, reducing batch size, and using agents to expose the decisions that need people.

The talk tests the case for cutting developer headcount against a public project's history. By following the work after agents take over coding and review, engineering leaders learn to locate the constraint before deciding where their developers are needed.