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There's no such thing as a small software team anymore

jacob.gold

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Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore

#21

Post by i_love_retros »

lofties wrote: post #5

My biggest issue with these type of posts is that they never answer the "why". Hell, they don't even ask the "why". > The more modular your code, the more agents you can run OK, but why would I want to run more agents? So I can be more productive? What does this productivity lead to? And are we actually being more productive? Take a look at Bun's repo on GitHub which seems to be fully automated. Well over 5000 PRs op…

My ex boss who was very very pro AI would constantly say that we need to be more productive. Which triggered in me the question of "why". Aren't we producing enough as a society at this point? We have enough for everyone, and the fact that it's not being shared fairly has nothing to do with productivity. We don't need "more", we need " better". And I don't think most uses of AI will lead to that. If we lived in a more just society I think we would concentrate all the AI resources on a few key areas where it could genuinely help make things better, like medical research. We don't need more and more crud apps.

Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore

#23

Post by alansaber »

davepeck wrote: post #2

A wise troll once said: > best weapon against complexity spirit demon is magic word: "no" In counterpoint, I believe small teams can remain small. Small teams can ship simple monoliths with high velocity, commit count, and quality. Service orientation didn’t suddenly become low-cost because of agents; the boundaries between multiple services that version and deploy independently are still tricky beasts to wrangle. An…

Agent spam is definitely an excercise in diminishing returns

Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore

#24

Post by john_minsk »

kstenerud wrote: post #13

Hundreds of bots modifying thousands of microservices may sound good on the surface, but all those thousands of microservices make up an architecture and a product. Agents aren't very good at carrying the entire model in their context, so when they reason about a small piece of code, they often come up with something that hurts other parts of the code (especially as the KLOCs pile up). The complexity hasn't been repl…

Why do you need to always modify the service? Once it is up and running and performs a function - don't touch it.

Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore

#25

Post by raincole »

You can use this as a canary.

The out-of-control factor = the number of parallel working agents : the number of human programmers.

1. If the factor > N, you're losing control and there will be no organizational wisdom passed down.

2. If your team can't function with the factor Choose N over your prior. My recommendation is 1.

Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore

#26

Post by skydhash »

horsawlarway wrote: post #8
lofties wrote: post #5

My biggest issue with these type of posts is that they never answer the "why". Hell, they don't even ask the "why". > The more modular your code, the more agents you can run OK, but why would I want to run more agents? So I can be more productive? What does this productivity lead to? And are we actually being more productive? Take a look at Bun's repo on GitHub which seems to be fully automated. Well over 5000 PRs op…

Yeah, I think engineering orgs mostly jumped the shark. Metrics like pr count and commits have always been terrible gauges for success compared to business performance. But they're easy to measure, and even easier to game now with AI. So we're seeing an outrageous gain on these metrics, and they've become almost completely divorced from business results. No one cares how fast you ship prs. They care that you offer a…

> It's like we've decided to measure how far we've traveled in gallons of gas burned, but completely forgotten about measuring miles per gallon.

Or forgotten to look at the map to see if we're getting closer to our destination.

I've never seen a consumer bugs that complains about how small our codebase is or how little PRs we have produced this month. It's always about some features not working properly.

Previously the core metrics were reducing consumer complaints and implementing features for the sales team to attract new clients. Then they suddenly got replaced by amount of PRs and token usages.

Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore

#27

Post by franciscop »

I saw the `require('gulp')` and the memories def came back. That's def how we used to do code ~10 years ago. I still don't like the multi-threaded PER PROJECT too much, I prefer having 2 projects and switching context window, I find the current tools (at least the ones I know) are a bit underwhelming for multi-threading. But I'm also trying to upgrade my knowledge.

A good way I've found, since I do a lot of OSS and have my own libraries, when I find a bug in one of those libraries I can work on the same project on the main window while fixing the library on another window. I normally need to tell the main one "let's skip this for now, I'm fixing the library" meanwhile or similarly.

Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore

#28

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

gulugawa wrote: post #3

I'm a 1 person dev team who wrote frontend code that outperforms React. Is was successful because I didn't use any sort of LLM assistance.

I’m a 1 person dev team that’s in the final stages of shipping a complete rewrite of a pretty big app (native frontend, server backend).

It’s going to be very successful, because I used all sorts of LLM assistance (and because it’s adding onto a successful app that’s been shipping for two years).

There’s absolutely no way that I could have managed this scale, on my own.

There will be examples of both success and failure, with LLMs.

Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore

#29

Post by kstenerud »

john_minsk wrote: post #24
kstenerud wrote: post #13

Hundreds of bots modifying thousands of microservices may sound good on the surface, but all those thousands of microservices make up an architecture and a product. Agents aren't very good at carrying the entire model in their context, so when they reason about a small piece of code, they often come up with something that hurts other parts of the code (especially as the KLOCs pile up). The complexity hasn't been repl…

Why do you need to always modify the service? Once it is up and running and performs a function - don't touch it.

For the same reason you change or replace any function in a program: The situation has changed.

Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore

#30

Post by shimman »

i_love_retros wrote: post #21
lofties wrote: post #5

My biggest issue with these type of posts is that they never answer the "why". Hell, they don't even ask the "why". > The more modular your code, the more agents you can run OK, but why would I want to run more agents? So I can be more productive? What does this productivity lead to? And are we actually being more productive? Take a look at Bun's repo on GitHub which seems to be fully automated. Well over 5000 PRs op…

My ex boss who was very very pro AI would constantly say that we need to be more productive. Which triggered in me the question of "why". Aren't we producing enough as a society at this point? We have enough for everyone, and the fact that it's not being shared fairly has nothing to do with productivity. We don't need "more", we need " better". And I don't think most uses of AI will lead to that. If we lived in a mor…

You would absolutely love the book Dawn of Everything.

Humans are way more creative at social cohesion when you remove oligarchs and authoritarians.

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