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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

#121

Post by maccard »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #118
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…

On the other hand, AI is good at following invariants and adversarially policing the system to pay back debt. The latter is too expensive for humans as a project grows. Right now you can open Claude Code in your project and prompt it "start a workflow that fans out subagents, each with a narrow scope, to look for {simplifications, correctness by construction opportunities, } ranked by impact vs confidence, and then c…

Are they? Because my experience is they’re really, really bad at following them and as context grows they get worse at following them.

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

#122

Post by mikojan »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #118
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…

On the other hand, AI is good at following invariants and adversarially policing the system to pay back debt. The latter is too expensive for humans as a project grows. Right now you can open Claude Code in your project and prompt it "start a workflow that fans out subagents, each with a narrow scope, to look for {simplifications, correctness by construction opportunities, } ranked by impact vs confidence, and then c…

This works great as long as you are not doing what the parent comment cautions you to not do: Let agents decide the architecture.

The moment you do that, why even bother producing a result.md? Just let the Bot execute on its findings, you realistically won't be able to judge them anyway.

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

#123

Post by ulrikrasmussen »

win311fwg wrote: post #89
ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then it sounds like you can only have a true microservice architecture if your application doesn't really need transactional guarantees, consistency or fault tolerance.

Then you must have heard the wrong thing. Oh well. You can't communicate with everyone.

Then please help me understand, it is entirely possible that I misunderstood you, but you are not clarifying your point.

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

#125

Post by whstl »

stymaar wrote: post #113

> A small team today, running 20-100 agents in parallel, might generate 500 commits/200 pushes/100 PRs Who the fuck is writing the requirements in that story?! Setting aside the problem of pushing AI-generated code that nobody has read straight to production, the reason why you're pushing code to production in the first place is to implement a product that is solving a problem for your users . And the problem I have…

Just ask AI to write Jira tickets and call it a day.

The point isn’t to serve customers anymore, it’s to use AI for AI sake because investors want, because they have FOMO.

I’m only half joking. I have seen PMs attempting that and getting fired. The investor thing is 100% true.

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

#126

Post by novok »

sebastiennight wrote: post #55
bpodgursky wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't say this to be mean, but you need to plan for a world where it's always summer. Maybe the valuations will collapse with OSS models but programming is never going back to normal.

> plan for a world where it's always summer The difficulty in adopting this belief lies in the fact we have multiple points of reference in the past, of visionaries claiming that "this time is different" and we reached the end of history... and well, the rest is history.

In tech 'this time it's different' happens about every 10 years, so yes? Mainframes, minicomputers, the PC revolution, the internet in the 90s, commodity cloud computing: even more internet, the smartphone and now AI. It's not the end of history, it's the continuation.

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

#127

Post by ulrikrasmussen »

I have already commented about this is probably the worst advice I have heard in a long time, and I would definitely not let this guy anywhere near a codebase I had to maintain.

But this is also essentially blogspam. The author intentionally includes two screenshots which add absolutely nothing to their point and which are too small to read. When you click the second one, you are not taken to a larger version, you are taken to the frontpage of his company website which features the same screenshot.

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

#129

Post by grey-area »

echelon wrote: post #63
zx8080 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but programming is never going back to normal. Are you telling it's shit now? I'm just curious.

You're not going to get your old job back. You're a prompt engineer or you're fired. Programming will never go back to what it was before 2026.

Many programmers still just write programs, using tools where it is useful.

Of course programming never stands still. I don’t think anyone thinks it will rewind. But your second sentence is very odd.

Your extraordinary claim may reflect life in certain companies in SV in the grip of AI Psychosis, but most companies are evaluating these tools objectively - they are certainly not ready to perform as agents or replace humans, and it is debateable whether they are providing much efficiency boost in the case where you try to replace humans writing code entirely - there are definitely significant downsides - loc inflation, lack of context, incorrect code which appears correct, wasted time, burnout of supervising humans having to read the output etc etc.

All the thought leaders like this article jumping to the shining future of independent agents cooperating under light human supervision are vastly premature - LLMs are nowhere near intelligent or independent enough for that.

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

#130

Post by elzbardico »

> While I’m not saying every LLM user is an imbecile, they’re built to convince the mediocre and incurious that they’re remarkable, and it turns out that a great many of them run venture capital firms and Fortune 500 companies.

> I also want to be clear that while there are sane and normal people who use these things, they’re mostly drowned out by a crowd of people that oscillate between bootlicking and regurgitating capitalist mythology in a way that makes it hard to trust anybody who spends significant amounts of time using an LLM.

> One thing you’ll notice about the most moistened AI boosters is that they lack much degree of pride in their work. Everything they say must, at some point, compliment the mindless, unprofitable, unreliable tool underneath it — how “incredibly powerful” it is, how it’s “only getting better,” how it’s “only the beginning” of something that’s eaten over a trillion dollars and absorbed the majority of venture capital.

Ed Zitron. The Revenge of the business idiot.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-revenge-of-the-business-idio...

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