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Mythical Man Month

martinfowler.com

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Re: Mythical Man Month

#191

Post by Nevermark »

noosphr wrote: post #150
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]…

We've found pyrite thinking it gold. Then we bought the whole saloon drinks and hookers. The hangover tomorrow morning will not be pleasant. And the bar tab even less so.

If only it wasn't a dichotomy!

Re: Mythical Man Month

#192

Post by dzonga »

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.

your output !!

but is the industry output over 10X ?

Re: Mythical Man Month

#193

Post by emp17344 »

slopinthebag wrote: post #22
hatsix wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I bet get I could hit 1000x output of random characters produced by smashing my hand against the keyboard.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#194

Post by syncsynchalt »

oleggromov wrote: post #117
sutro wrote: post #19

"The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination." -FB

When I was young, in my teens, I already knew a bit about programming but of course nothing about the industry. These beautiful metaphors by Brooks, from books like inmates running the asylum, etc - they made me romanticize the industry I had no idea about. Now, about 20 years later, I wonder to which extent they influenced me to take the path I've taken. Because when I began, it wasn't lucrative or cool in the sligh…

It's funny, I also read the book as a teen, and I came away from it amazed that IBM was dedicating entire team members to inter-/extra-team communication.

Before that I hadn't even considered how necessary a product manager or project manager were in software development.

But it was the "No Silver Bullet" essay added as a bonus in my copy that I think about the most. "Never again will we see a 10x productivity increase in a decade", this is self-evident now but must have been crushing to people who had experienced the first compilers, the first high-level languages, the first interactive terminals, and waited for the next incredible leap.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#195

Post by viccis »

ventana wrote: post #62
hansvm wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's more like ∞x (or N/Ax if you prefer) because the majority of the projects I did with LLM agents wouldn't have existed without them, because I would've never found enough time to work on them. One of the latest things I made with Claude was a tool that allowed me to move a bunch of very low traffic Cloud Run services to a single VPS without losing any of the Cloud Run benefits such as easy Docker-based deployment…

>or N/Ax if you prefer

It's not a matter of preference

Re: Mythical Man Month

#196

Post by nvader »

physicles wrote: post #163
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,…

This is the kind of practice I was going to get an insight into.

For your conceptual-model.md, do you find natural language is sufficient? Do you use pseudo code, Entity Relationship modeling, or anything like that?

And how do you go about round-tripping it from the source code, keeping it up to say with any changes, and yet at the right later of abstraction?

Re: Mythical Man Month

#197

Post by viccis »

eitland wrote: post #87
hansvm wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

My friend who has never taken a programming class (or even touched an IDE before AFAIK) has now put a small app into production. Complete frontend + backend + database. Yes, it is an internal app, but it works and everyone loves it. Does that count as an example? (Also I absolutely expect him to need help at some point, but so far it has taken his project from absolutely impossible to 3 weeks of work in between work,…

These kind of things (internal tools created out of band of normal engineering practices by non-engineers) were amazing back when I did pentesting because the security was always the last consideration. That got harder when SaaS became preferable to rolling your own stuff for everything. Guess things are gonna get fun again for red teams lol

Re: Mythical Man Month

#198

Post by mickgardner »

I'm living this hell right now.

Management just keep hiring developers. Coordination and communication between them and product managers gets more difficult.

Management keep agreeing to unrealistic timelines on new projects, yet haven't completed the old projects yet.

The architecture of the codebase is so convoluted and confusing that new devs take a very long time to get anywhere close to productive and self sufficient. Time to develop and release acceptable features gets longer and longer.

On top of all that, senior devs and tech leads are very up tight about code quality and 'how to write your code' yet can't even agree with each other on 'how to write your code' leading to Pull Request hell for devs and occasional whole week rewrites.

I'd buy a copy of this book and put it on my bosses desk, but he won't read it.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#199

Post by phyzix5761 »

mickgardner wrote: post #198

I'm living this hell right now. Management just keep hiring developers. Coordination and communication between them and product managers gets more difficult. Management keep agreeing to unrealistic timelines on new projects, yet haven't completed the old projects yet. The architecture of the codebase is so convoluted and confusing that new devs take a very long time to get anywhere close to productive and self suffic…

Best advice I ever got was to let management fail on their unrealistic deadlines. You do this enough times and they'll start to get more realistic.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#200

Post by ern »

jgrahamc wrote: post #98
hansvm wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I am building a better interface for managing KNX systems than the ETS6 software. Code is here: https://github.com/jgrahamc/koolenex 1. I would not have attempted this without AI assistance because it's a big project. 2. I have built a functional program that I am able to use for real work in a handful of weeks, working part time on this (like literally a few hours per day prompting Claude and Kimi). 3. Had I decided…

I suspect that the goalposts for AI-assisted coding will be moved the same way they've been moved for the Turing Test.

The Turing Test used to matter until it didn't (does anyone even talk about it? was there a big news conference when it was solved?). Likewise every time it becomes easier to ship software, the bar will be pushed higher by sceptics. Ultimately the gatekeeping is going to become meaningless as software becomes "too cheap to meter".

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