The three hidden attention taxes derailing the agentic SDLC

AI-generated and long-running agent workflows are increasing the volume of pull requests beyond what engineering teams can reasonably review, making human attention a scarce resource in software development. The passage identifies three “attention taxes”: triage, in which developers must determine a change’s urgency, value, risk, readiness, and appropriate reviewer rather than relying on queue order; comprehension, in which reviewers reconstruct a change’s purpose and effects from fragmented, implementation-oriented diffs; and vigilance, in which teams must continue assessing security, dependencies, and architectural assumptions after code is merged. It argues that conventional review and rule-based security tools are insufficient for large, complex, AI-produced changes, and calls for systems that prioritize reviews by consequence, explain changes through user flows, contracts, integrations, tests, and migrations, and monitor their implications over time. The central goal is to reduce low-value review overhead so developers can focus their judgment on building and maintaining safer, more intentional codebases.

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