Creating custom software, and perhaps client services in general, are more like agriculture than manufacturing. We aren't stamping out identical units and trying to increase "efficiency" by speeding up the process; we can't, because we can't negotiate away the time it takes to grow. Debugging, or copyediting, is like weeding. Creators and managers aren't forcing a thing to happen; we're guiding the creative spirit, feeding it, and guarding the fruit from harm.

Brooks's Law, pointing out that adding more staffers to a late software project makes it later, has something in common with "Nine women can't have a baby in a month." Add that to No Silver Bullet and you see that the irreducible bottleneck is the complicated thought it takes to make a complicated thing, an artifact of (arguably) the summit of human civilization. Not to sound like Louis CK.