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Mythical Man Month

martinfowler.com

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Re: Mythical Man Month

#161

Post by duskdozer »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #143
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.

> AI is the silver bullet - my output is genuinely 10X what it was before claude code existed. This reminds me of ThePrimeagen noting that Dario was right about 90% of all software being written by AI. 90%+ of all useful software is still being written by humans, but now we've also got non-programmers like Gary Tan pushing the button to generate garbage piles of AI generated code at 10x the volume of what humans are…

>https://techtrenches.dev/p/the-snake-that-ate-itself-what-cl...

Ugh, I've started having a visceral reaction to that typeface+card-layout+color-scheme combo; is the author using it ironically?

Re: Mythical Man Month

#162

Post by duskdozer »

ben_w wrote: post #41
bogdanoff_2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 coworker…

>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.

I can't name a single new feature Android has gained since version 13, or at least one that I am aware I use. I have a large handful of performance issues, feature removals, and UI annoyances that have been introduced, though.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#163

Post by physicles »

nvader wrote: post #35

Fortunate to be reminded of this right now, especially the pull-quote about conceptual integrity. This is the reason why AI-assisted programming has not turned out to be the silver bullet we have been hoping for, at least yet. Muddled prompting by humans gets you the Homer Simpson car you wished for, that will eventually collapse under its own weight. I've been thinking a lot about Programming as Theory Building [0]…

I love that Naur paper! Also love this essay that extends it: https://hiringengineersbook.com/post/autonomy/

I literally maintain a conceptual-model.md that describes the “things” in our entire system, how they relate to each other, and some bits about how that maps to the code (the DB schema maps sort of closely to it but sometimes not that close, and so does the API, and that’s ok). I wrote most of the doc myself, but plan to coauthor with LLMs going forward.

So far it’s saved me tons of typing as I add features. I don’t have enough data yet on how well it will guide myself and others when adding stuff that really stretches the model, but I’m also optimistic that it’s a valuable approach.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#164

Post by wahnfrieden »

rafaelmn wrote: post #80
nemo1618 wrote: post #46

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, developmen…

How well does that work for you ? It's annoyingly inconsistent for me - I give it instructions on how to fetch JIRA ticket with a script that renders everything relevant to a .md and half of the time it will still default to reading it via ACLI. I have instructions on how to do a full build with warnaserror before commit but I still get pipeline errors regularly because it will skip the noincremental part, etc.

Use Codex. It benchmarks much better at instruction following.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#165

Post by moi2388 »

When I first heard about the book I accidentally read it as “Mythical Man Moth” and was deeply intrigued how this was about software development and immeasurably disappointed when I found out it was “month” instead.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#166

Post by matchagaucho »

In agentic design, I keep coming back to the idea of “how easily we can compose elements”, along with Fowler’s OOP and refactoring principles.

It’s a new frontier, and there are no absolutes. But I suspect the most durable AI systems will be built around highly composable, well-orchestrated agents.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#167

Post by marcosdumay »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #158
eloisant wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software written in Big tech companies is probably written at 90% with AI. Now you could claim that software from Google/Meta/Microsoft is useless, but billions of humans rely on it every day.

I highly doubt that, unless you are talking about something much more specific like test cases. There is certainly no sign of these companies becoming more productive. Most of the software that "billions" of humans are relying from any of these companies are things like Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Google Search, FaceBook, that were not written, or rewritten, in last 1-2 years, so were certainly not written b…

> There is certainly no sign of these companies becoming more productive.

Oh, if you look at real signs, like uptime and number of bugs, they are becoming very clear.

But it's not clear how much of it is caused by the layoffs and how much is because of LLMs.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#168

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

duskdozer wrote: post #161
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI is the silver bullet - my output is genuinely 10X what it was before claude code existed. This reminds me of ThePrimeagen noting that Dario was right about 90% of all software being written by AI. 90%+ of all useful software is still being written by humans, but now we've also got non-programmers like Gary Tan pushing the button to generate garbage piles of AI generated code at 10x the volume of what humans are…

> https://techtrenches.dev/p/the-snake-that-ate-itself-what-cl ... Ugh, I've started having a visceral reaction to that typeface+card-layout+color-scheme combo; is the author using it ironically?

I browse on my desktop and all these mobile-optimized blog sites look like crap regardless of color schemes etc, so I try to ignore that.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#169

Post by Jach »

raincole wrote: post #21
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 ma…

I think the fuller version of the "'no silver bullet' is wrong" claim is at: https://blog.ploeh.dk/2019/07/01/yes-silver-bullet/

A weaker claim is that maybe there's no single silver bullet but there have been many bronze bullets that add up to more than a single silver bullet. I readily endorse at least that and think it's rather easy to justify.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#170

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

marcosdumay wrote: post #167
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly doubt that, unless you are talking about something much more specific like test cases. There is certainly no sign of these companies becoming more productive. Most of the software that "billions" of humans are relying from any of these companies are things like Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Google Search, FaceBook, that were not written, or rewritten, in last 1-2 years, so were certainly not written b…

> There is certainly no sign of these companies becoming more productive. Oh, if you look at real signs, like uptime and number of bugs, they are becoming very clear. But it's not clear how much of it is caused by the layoffs and how much is because of LLMs.

Well, not exactly productivity, but yes there are some symptoms of a reduction in quality from some companies. I was about to say not the three mentioned, but GitHub (owned by Microsoft) is certainly one, and Amazon seems to be having an uptick in outages that are anecdotally linked to use of AI. Anthropic, who we know are using AI a lot internally also have reliability problems.
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