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Mythical Man Month

martinfowler.com

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Re: Mythical Man Month

#41

Post by ben_w »

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?

Code is always easy to multiply fruitlessly, always has been.

Features are harder to show the limits of, but have you ever had a client or boss who didn't know what they wanted, they just kept asking for stuff? 100 sequential tickets to change the contrast of some button can be closed in record time, but the final impact is still just the final one of the sequence.

Or have you experienced bike-shedding* from coworkers in meetings? It doesn't matter what metaphorical colour the metaphorical bike shed gets painted.

Or, as a user, had a mandatory update that either didn't seem to do anything at all, or worse moved things in the UX around so you couldn't find features you actually did use? Something I get with many apps and operating systems; I'd say MacOS's UX peaked back when versions were named after cats. Non-UX stuff got better since then, but the UX (even the creation of SwiftUI as an attempt to replace UIKit and AppKit) feels like it was CV-driven development, not something that benefits me as a user.

You can add a lot of features and close a lot of tickets while adding zero-to-negative business value. When code was expensive, that cost could be used directly as a reason to say "let's delay this"; now you have to explain more directly to the boss or the client why they're asking for an actively bad thing instead of it being a replacement of an expensive gamble with a cheap gamble. This is not something most of us are trained to do well, I think. Worse, even those of us who are skilled at that kind of client interactions, the fact of code suddenly being cheap means that many of us have mis-trained instincts on what's actually important, in exactly the way that those customers and bosses should be suspicious of.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

Re: Mythical Man Month

#42

Post by jrumbut »

skydhash wrote: post #26
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.

I agree with this sentiment but I think LLMs are really close to the Brooks idea of a silver bullet.

I don't know if, overall, it's a 10x improvement or 6x or 14x but it's a serious contender. Part of it is the LLMs are very uneven in their performance across domains. If all I build is simple landing pages, it might be a 100x improvement. If I work on more complex, proprietary work where there aren't great examples in the training data then it might be a 10% improvement (it helps me write better comments or something)

Re: Mythical Man Month

#44

Post by jh00ker »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #31
jh00ker wrote: post #15

As a software engineering manager, I always look to staff up a project at the beginning as much as possible, looking for doing as much in parallel up-front as we can. If some things take longer than expected, then I already have a team of engineers with all the context since the project kicked off that can help each other with any longer running tasks. An engineer that has completed a smaller chunk of work can help o…

Fred brooks would not necessarily endorse this.

Please, say more!

>I always look to staff up a project at the beginning as much as possible, looking for doing as much in parallel up-front as we can.

Ah, maybe this is what you think he would take issue with? Fair enough. Perhaps I should have said:

>I always look to staff up as much as is economically and organizationally optimal, to exploit all genuine parallelism opportunities, being careful not to overstaff.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#45

Post by tudelo »

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?

Most of my work has been in core infra at large companies. Having the code written faster does not change rollout velocity all that much... It does help with signals and idiot proofing on bugs but when things break and cost real (very real) dollars AI is not an explanation. In that instance, its not even close. Development might be 10-20 percent of the actual work to get a change out.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#46

Post by nemo1618 »

It's interesting to revisit Brooks' "surgical team" in light of AI. For example, I frequently have Claude act as a "toolsmith", creating bespoke project-specific tools on the fly, which are then documented in Skills that Claude can use going forward. What has changed is that a) One person (or rather, one person-AI hybrid) plays all the roles within the surgical team, and b) Internal frictions such as cost, development time, and communication overhead have all been dramatically slashed.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#47

Post by hansvm »

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 haven't yet seen anyone with a concrete example project (public ideally, but even describing private efforts in enough detail to enable potential criticism would be fine) making a claim as strong as 10x. Are you willing to break the mould and show us what we're all missing?

Re: Mythical Man Month

#48

Post by cdavid »

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 main point of mythical man month was that communication cost across people was the main cost as project grow in complexity.

So increasing individual output by itself is not enough to affect the argument. It could, if you also reduce the size of people needed for a project, where people are everyone included in the project, not just SWE. But there are strong forces in large orgs to pull toward larger project sizes: budgeting overhead and other similar large orgs optimize for legibility kind of arguments.

IMO the only way this will change is when new companies will challenge existing big guys. I think AI will help achieve this (e.g. agentic e-commerce challenging the existing players), but it will take time.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#49

Post by furyofantares »

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.

There are sizes of projects where it's true, and that size is growing.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#50

Post by plausibility »

lp4v4n wrote: post #39
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'm curious to check how faster AAA games will hit the market in the next years compared to the pre-LLM era. Or how much of the aging COBOL code base out there will disappear in the next decade. When concrete things like that start to happen, then I will start to believe in the 10x claim.

I feel like that’s tied to the hardware the companies are using. All the banks I’ve worked at run z/OS mainframes, can they even deploy modern run of the mill Go/Python/Rust code or is getting off COBOL reliant on hardware changes?
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