2026-08-28·by Sijie Wang#optimization#kkt-isomorphisms

verification-is-the-new-latency

Under wirths-law-as-kkt-constraint the conserved quantity migrates as the cheap resource changes. Cheap machine cycles dissipated into developer attention. Now cheap cognition dissipates into human verification bandwidth: capability gains don't become reliability, they become task-ambition inflation — "AI gets stronger exactly as fast as people use it for sloppier things."

So the binding constraint of the AI era is how fast a human can check the output. Latency was the thing you waited on; now verification is. A harness's scarcest managed resource is therefore the queue to human attentiontwo-scarcities-arbitrage.

One dis-isomorphism from classic Wirth: the AI substrate is itself an agent, so it can eat its own scaffolding → prosthetic-vs-constitutive-scaffolding.

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