Why does absorption become the constraint?#
Every step that AI speeds up moves the bottleneck somewhere else — see constraint migration. Absorption is where that movement often ends. Customers can only learn so many new things. Support teams can only answer so many new questions. Regulators approve at their own pace. None of that gets faster because the build got faster.
What happens to change nobody can absorb?#
Output that nobody can absorb is inventory, and it has to be maintained. A feature shipped to an audience that cannot take it on is not a delivered outcome: it is code that now needs support, security patching and eventual removal, with none of the value that was supposed to pay for it.
This is why measuring the delivery loop end to end matters more than measuring how fast code gets written. An organisation that only measures build speed will keep investing in the one part of the system that is no longer holding it back.