This post was originally published on ashwch.com.
CI dropped from 37 minutes to 9, at 35% lower cost. Here is what we learned about the hidden queue, mixing Claude and Codex, and where the real multiplier came from.
Every engineering team has a version of this story. Your roadmap looks healthy. Feature velocity looks fine. But your engineers are still losing chunks of every day to things that were never planned. That is the hidden queue. It is not on your roadmap, it is not in your sprints, and it is costing you more than most feature work.