I think this makes an assumption early on which is that things are serialized, when usually they are not.
If I complete a bugfix every 30 minutes, and submit them all for review, then I really don't care whether the review completes 5 hours later. By that time I have fixed 10 more bugs!
Sure, getting review feedback 5 hours later will force me to context switch back to 10 bugs ago and try to remember what that was about, and that might mean spending a few more minutes than necessary. But that time was going to be spent _anyway_ on that bug, even if the review had happened instantly.
The key to keeping speed up in slow async communication is just working on N things at the same time.
Not sure, but there might be a misunderstanding here:
The value of your bug fix is cashed out only when it reaches the customer, not when you have finished implementing it.
There is a cost of delay for value to reach the customer, and we want that delay to be as short as possible.
So it doesn't matter if you fix 10 bugs because your 10th bug is going to reach production 5x10 hours (that's an exageration, but you get the point) after you had fixed it (which is why the article mentions latency and not touch time)
You can tell me "yes but I also participate in the code review effort in parallel). Yes, but then you are not fixing 10 bugs, you are fixing less and reviewing more, and reviews take longer than implementation (especially with LLMs now in the loop).
It's because of the pretty counter-intuitive Little's Law : the more in-progress you have in parallel, the slower it will get for each item to be completed.
I made a queuing theory calculator for this: https://joshmoody.org/blog/number-of-agents/#number-of-agent...
Although you'll have to mentally replace the word "agent" with "PR" for it to make sense in this context. The math is the same. It all boils down to how much those context switches costs you. If it's a large cost, then you can get a huge productivity boost by increasing review speed.
In the "show calculations" section, the amount of wasted time caused by context switching is the delta between the numbers in the phrase "T_r adjusted from 30.0 to 35 minutes". That number is increases as context switching cost and "average agent time" (AKA "average PR review time") goes up.