I recall seeing a video in which a senior vice president of Symbolics (yes, the Lisp machine people) claimed that their aim was to put the largest software proj

I recall seeing a video in which a senior vice president of Symbolics (yes, the Lisp machine people) claimed that their aim was to put the largest software projects within reach of a small team, and everything smaller would be feasible by a single person. Had Lisp machines (as an idea) remained viable, we might've come close! But managers just love having large teams to command, and we've invented process and ceremony to fill up the spare time necessary to do the work of ten programmers with a hundred, as well as rejecting technologies like Lisp and Smalltalk that give individual programmers tremendous leverage over the problem space. Should AI actually make people more productive, instead of being an endless generator of messes for fleshbags to clean up, I imagine some successor of Scrum to come along to tie up most of staff programmers' work days with meetings. Hell, that may happen anyway.