4 ms·

More importantly it collapses mythical-man-month communication overhead.

jonfromsf 6mo ago
This is an amazing frame /reframe.
tclancy 6mo ago
Hang on, tell me how, because I am not picking up what you are putting down. At a minimum, wouldn’t this require working from a perfectly written spec that has already accounted for the discovery of changes that would need to be made from the original perfect spec?
- fragmede 6mo ago
  The way I see it, because you can spin up additional AI employees at will (and spin them back down), when the problem with the spec is found, it's no big deal to redo all of that work from before, adjusting for that change.
  - mainguy 5mo ago
    Ironically, people keep saying this, but then gloss over the core problem of coordinated between these agents... For completely independent codebases with no dependencies, sure thing right on...go for it. But the vast majority of F500 companies I work with have wild and undocumented dependencies between almost every system that will take years to "agentify" (assuming they ever figure out that it's an organization and governance problem.... which they might not ever realize)
- michaelbuckbee 6mo ago
  So we have two things here: 1. "Mythical Man Month" which is the shorthand for a whole book + concept that you can't just throw more people at a software development project and get linear productivity improvements as the communications overhead (meetings, emails, mistakes due to poor assumptions, etc.) deeply eat into the raw number of productive hours that a new person added to the team brings. 2. AI automation tools (Claude Code) are often described as a "junior developer" which is an imperfect comparison as while you could potentially sort of set them up that way many people use them as more of a singular force multiplier. I use them to work on many more projects in many more ways and ship far more than I could even if I had a "junior developer" sitting alongside of me as there's not the same level of communication needed.

This is an amazing frame /reframe.

Hang on, tell me how, because I am not picking up what you are putting down. At a minimum, wouldn’t this require working from a perfectly written spec that has already accounted for the discovery of changes that would need to be made from the original perfect spec?

fragmede 6mo ago
The way I see it, because you can spin up additional AI employees at will (and spin them back down), when the problem with the spec is found, it's no big deal to redo all of that work from before, adjusting for that change.
- mainguy 5mo ago
  Ironically, people keep saying this, but then gloss over the core problem of coordinated between these agents... For completely independent codebases with no dependencies, sure thing right on...go for it. But the vast majority of F500 companies I work with have wild and undocumented dependencies between almost every system that will take years to "agentify" (assuming they ever figure out that it's an organization and governance problem.... which they might not ever realize)
michaelbuckbee 6mo ago
So we have two things here: 1. "Mythical Man Month" which is the shorthand for a whole book + concept that you can't just throw more people at a software development project and get linear productivity improvements as the communications overhead (meetings, emails, mistakes due to poor assumptions, etc.) deeply eat into the raw number of productive hours that a new person added to the team brings. 2. AI automation tools (Claude Code) are often described as a "junior developer" which is an imperfect comparison as while you could potentially sort of set them up that way many people use them as more of a singular force multiplier. I use them to work on many more projects in many more ways and ship far more than I could even if I had a "junior developer" sitting alongside of me as there's not the same level of communication needed.