What does the delivery loop span?#
Product, engineering, operations and often finance, legal and support. It runs from an idea, tested cheaply before it consumes capacity, through a build and a risk-matched release, to a measured result. The build loop is one step inside it, and the only step AI coding agents made dramatically faster.
Why is this where the waiting is?#
Every handoff between functions is a queue, and queues dominate elapsed time. Work that takes hours of effort routinely takes weeks of calendar, and almost all of the gap is waiting. Mapping the value stream shows where.
DORA metrics measure the stretch from commit to production. A declared outcome check closes the loop, so every release produces evidence about whether it helped. Our AI native assessment starts from the same map.