You made every API call fire at once. What changed under load?
You are faster than ever. The question nobody asks is for how long.
The Exhibit
You are faster with the AI on. That is real, and nobody is asking you to pretend otherwise. It was never the interesting question. The interesting question is what happens to the part of the craft you have stopped doing yourself. A 666-person study found that the more people offloaded their thinking to AI, the lower they scored on critical thinking. The study.
Survey data, correlational, so read it as a pattern and not a proof. But you know the pattern from your own work: the code ships faster while you no longer reason it out yourself. Fast today. The question is how long you keep the skill when the tool does the practice for you.
The study
Comprehension Debt
Comprehension debt: the gap between what gets shipped and what the team can still reason about.
A skill you stop using does not stay at full strength until you return to it. The skill fades while the work keeps shipping on schedule, and you only find out the day the tool is wrong and the reasoning is suddenly yours to do. The speed is real. What you are losing is the skill underneath it.
The idea
The Rep
Thirty seconds:
You take code that calls an API once per item, sequentially, and change it to fire every call at once. Same output, faster. What did you change about behavior under load, and when does it break?
The answer
Sequential became fully concurrent. Every call is scheduled at once and the natural backpressure of doing them one at a time is gone. The platform may still cap how many actually run in parallel, but you have given up the pacing the sequential version provided for free. Faster until the volume hits a rate limit, exhausts sockets or file descriptors, drains the connection pool, or overloads the downstream service. The fix is bounded concurrency: run them in parallel but cap how many are in flight at once, instead of releasing all of them unbounded.
About thirty seconds