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Mythical Man Month

martinfowler.com

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Re: Mythical Man Month

#21

Post by raincole »

alasdair_ wrote: post #8

Notably, his essay “no silver bullet” states that there has never been a new technology or way of thinking or working that has led to a 10X increase in the speed of software development. That was true for almost seventy years until roughly last year. AI is the silver bullet - my output is genuinely 10X what it was before claude code existed.

The premise of "no silver bullet" is wrong (LLM just made it clear, but it has always been wrong).

The premise is that the software development had been mostly "essential complexity" rather than "accidental complexity." But I think anyone who worked as SE in the past decade would have found the opposite is true.

It's not only that software development is full of accidental complexity. Programmers (and the decision makers above them) have always been actively creating accidental complexity. Making a GUI program hasn't gotten easier since Visual Basic. In fact for each JavaScript framework and technique that wraps around DOM render engine, it has got harder over years. Until LLMs made it easier again (by creating a permanent dependency on LLMs. If you intend to edit the code manually afterwards, it became even harder!)

Re: Mythical Man Month

#22

Post by slopinthebag »

hatsix wrote: post #20
slopinthebag wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10x would only be possible if your output was low before Claude Code

I've found that I can have 10x output, so long as I don't expect anyone to review your code...

I can get 100x output, if we're counting lines of code!

Re: Mythical Man Month

#23

Post by janalsncm »

jdw64 wrote: post #6

[flagged]

It would probably be more practical to make old age less expensive than to inject more people into the bottom of the demographic pyramid. Those young people eventually get old too. I am looking forward to my sentient robot caretaker:

“Open the refrigerator door, HAL”

“I can’t do that right now”

Re: Mythical Man Month

#24

Post by deadbabe »

alasdair_ wrote: post #8

Notably, his essay “no silver bullet” states that there has never been a new technology or way of thinking or working that has led to a 10X increase in the speed of software development. That was true for almost seventy years until roughly last year. AI is the silver bullet - my output is genuinely 10X what it was before claude code existed.

Just because code has been put out does not mean the software is “developed”.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#25

Post by bogdanoff_2 »

batshit_beaver wrote: post #18
alasdair_ wrote: post #8

Notably, his essay “no silver bullet” states that there has never been a new technology or way of thinking or working that has led to a 10X increase in the speed of software development. That was true for almost seventy years until roughly last year. AI is the silver bullet - my output is genuinely 10X what it was before claude code existed.

10x the amount of code or features =/= 10x the speed of software development.

How is that not the same thing?

Re: Mythical Man Month

#26

Post by skydhash »

alasdair_ wrote: post #8

Notably, his essay “no silver bullet” states that there has never been a new technology or way of thinking or working that has led to a 10X increase in the speed of software development. That was true for almost seventy years until roughly last year. AI is the silver bullet - my output is genuinely 10X what it was before claude code existed.

> that has led to a 10X increase in the speed of software development.

> AI is the silver bullet - my output is genuinely 10X what it was before claude code existed.

Those are not the same.

You can add 5 different features to a project and still provide less value that the 5 lines diff that resolves a performance bottleneck.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#27

Post by jdw64 »

janalsncm wrote: post #23
jdw64 wrote: post #6

[flagged]

It would probably be more practical to make old age less expensive than to inject more people into the bottom of the demographic pyramid. Those young people eventually get old too. I am looking forward to my sentient robot caretaker: “Open the refrigerator door, HAL” “I can’t do that right now”

If he had saved enough money to subscribe to the Pro tier, HAL might have opened it.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#28

Post by gensym »

alasdair_ wrote: post #8

Notably, his essay “no silver bullet” states that there has never been a new technology or way of thinking or working that has led to a 10X increase in the speed of software development. That was true for almost seventy years until roughly last year. AI is the silver bullet - my output is genuinely 10X what it was before claude code existed.

I've been thinking about this and have wanted to discuss it with people. I think the 10x thing has been broken, but I don't think it's because the premise of "No Silver Bullet" was false - I think it's because LLMs have the ability to navigate some of the _essential_ complexity of problems.

I don't think anyone has really wrestled with the implications of that yet - we've started talking about "deskilling" and "congnitive debt" but mostly in the context of "programmers are going to forget how to structure code - how to use the syntax of their languages, etc et etc)." I'm not worried about that as it's the same sort of thing we've seen for decades - compilers, higher-order languages, better abstracts, etc etc etc.

The fact that LLMs are able to wrestle with essential complexity means that using them is going to push us further and further from the actual problems we're trying to solve. Right now, it's the wrestling with problems that helps us understand what those problems are. As our organizations adopt LLMs that are able to take on _those_ problems - that is, customer problems, not problems of data, scaling, and so forth - will we hit a brick wall where we lose that understanding? Where we keep shipping stuff but it gets further and further from what our customers need? How do we avoid that?

Re: Mythical Man Month

#29

Post by jen20 »

bogdanoff_2 wrote: post #25
batshit_beaver wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10x the amount of code or features =/= 10x the speed of software development.

How is that not the same thing?

Writing code is a part (sometimes a big part, sometimes not) of delivering software to production. The overall system throughput is the interesting thing to look at.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#30

Post by altcognito »

jdw64 wrote: post #16
alasdair_ wrote: post #8

Notably, his essay “no silver bullet” states that there has never been a new technology or way of thinking or working that has led to a 10X increase in the speed of software development. That was true for almost seventy years until roughly last year. AI is the silver bullet - my output is genuinely 10X what it was before claude code existed.

[flagged]

Horses weren't replaced overnight.

Also, I know that there will be a lot of boilerplate applications that just don't look good or seem to have been well thought out early on.

Folks will use that as a cope mechanism, but huge changes are coming.

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