Platform Engineering & AI: The Bottleneck Is Just The Beginning
Platform Engineering, Monday, August 11th, 2025
In a recent post, Bryan Ross - Field CTO at GitLab - warns that AI doesn't just produce more code; it also generates more bugs, broken builds, reviews and security vulnerabilities - posing a new quality bottleneck that every platform team must confront.
He's right. But if we're familiar with the Theory of Constraints, The Goal, and The Phoenix Project, we know this is exactly how progress unfolds - each bottleneck addressed simply reveals the next. And that's okay. In fact, that's the nature of continuous improvement.
Seeing Bottlenecks as Signals, Not Failures
At its core, the Theory of Constraints (TOC) teaches that any system is limited - not by many things - but by one critical constraint at a time. The five focusing steps - identify, exploit, subordinate, elevate and then repeat - reflect a relentless cycle of improvement.
That's the same lesson The Goal drives home: When you fix one bottleneck, another inevitably emerges. It's not doom-it's progress.