The Audit Tax: Why Your Agent Made You Slower

The Audit Tax is a concept where agent-based development velocity is borrowed time, re-invoiced with interest at review time. This is because agents write PRs quickly, but humans pay for that speed in review time. To combat this, engineers should implement cheap, deterministic gates like typecheck, tests, lint, and build, and then use a review subagent to check the diff against stated intent. This can help reduce the time it takes to get agent-produced code into production.