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Mythical Man Month

martinfowler.com

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Re: Mythical Man Month

#121

Post by Deeds67 »

stephbook wrote: post #81
corndoge wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, the real strength of AI is less in replacing engineering skills, it's more in slashing all the time we spend not using those skills and doing low level research and data correlation tasks instead. Which isn't to say that those tasks aren't valuable in their own way, but in terms of raw output...

I long for the day when they will supervise CI/CD systems. Trying to fix syntax errors in strong interpolation on a 5-minute-delay loop is hell.

Just create a skill for it -> I call mine `babysit`. It spins up a subagent that polls it every x minutes and auto-fixes it until it's green. I already continue with the next task while it does that in the background

Re: Mythical Man Month

#122

Post by cheschire »

jwr wrote: post #104

I re-read that book every 10 years and try to think carefully about whether what Brooks wrote still holds. The last three times I read the book, everything held. This time, I'm not so sure: AI does change things significantly. Perhaps not for all teams and not all scales of software, but in my case (solo developer, complex software system) I did measure a 12x productivity increase [1]. Also, some of the problems Broo…

Maybe I’m misunderstanding but that sounds like a 6x improvement not 12x.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#123

Post by dgellow »

OtherShrezzing wrote: post #76
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.

You’re describing output while the essay is discussing productivity. If you’re 10x more productive, someone is willing to pay you 10x as much as they were last year, because you’re producing 10x as much value as before. Has your salary increased 10x?

> If you’re 10x more productive, someone is willing to pay you 10x as much as they were last year, because you’re producing 10x as much value as before. Has your salary increased 10x?

That's too simplistic because the rest of the economy isn't static. Everyone is getting access to AI tooling, if the whole field gets a productivity increase then the baseline changes, you don't just become 10x more valuable. The previous work is now way less valuable than it was before. It's also not clear to me that the productivity gains from AI convert 1:1 into profit gains

Re: Mythical Man Month

#124

Post by dgellow »

OtherShrezzing wrote: post #99
doesnt_know wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe the 10x claims, but since when has salary been any indication of productivity?

Productivity is a value measured in dollars. So if you’re 10x more productive, someone somewhere is making 10x the $ value from your output. You should expect this to be reflected in the labour market somewhere. Maybe not your own salary, but in somebody’s salary.

In economics productivity is generally the outputs divided by the inputs used for production. Are you talking specifically about capital productivity?

Re: Mythical Man Month

#125

Post by e12e »

jwr wrote: post #104

I re-read that book every 10 years and try to think carefully about whether what Brooks wrote still holds. The last three times I read the book, everything held. This time, I'm not so sure: AI does change things significantly. Perhaps not for all teams and not all scales of software, but in my case (solo developer, complex software system) I did measure a 12x productivity increase [1]. Also, some of the problems Broo…

Sounds like a blog post on your experience would be very interesting.

Like a sibling comment - I'm also curious about what that 12x means for you and your business - same revenue at fewer hours? More revenue, fewer hours? Etc.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#126

Post by wallst07 »

rafaelmn wrote: post #116
freedomben wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had that happen before too, and I just added a line to CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md something like (adapted to your example): When asked to fetch JIRA tickets, use the "fetch-jira" skill rather than reading via ACLI Claude has gotten better about following CLAUDE.md over the last year (it was pretty laughably bad at it previously).

I have that both in the skill and in CLAUDE.md but it's not reliable - and polluting CLAUDE.md with task specific instructions kind of sucks.

I have the same issue too, 99% of the it's for two reasons

1) It tried the tool, but for some reason it worked unexpectedly and Claude is VERY good at working around problems, it won't just stop.

2) Context got too long so those rules were "forgotten"

Re: Mythical Man Month

#127

Post by alexpotato »

Anytime I read an article about increasing software delivery times, I think of this quote:

“Through more vigorous computer programing and more sophisticated scheduling, it was possible to reduce the changeover period from two weeks to two days.”

- Lee Iacocca (in his autobiography)

Re: Mythical Man Month

#128

Post by wallst07 »

Deeds67 wrote: post #120
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'm building an open source Google Photos alternative. Have a look at my project and tell me if you think you could do all this at the same speed without an LLM: https://opennoodle.de Direct github link: https://github.com/open-noodle/gallery

It doesn't completely blow away your argument, but you forked Immich and gave it to a LLM. Which is arguably slightly easier than starting from scratch.

Nothing wrong with forks though.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#129

Post by alexpotato »

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…

> 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.

I also do this.

e.g. after watching Claude burn tokens building and then deploying a docker image multiple times (and it taking extra time), I asked it to just create a build.and.deploy.sh script. I also then have a test.deploy.sh script that Claude can use to confirm everything worked.

Saves a ton of time/tokens AND has the added benefit of being usable by me or other humans when doing manual tests or debugging outages etc.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#130

Post by wallst07 »

Deeds67 wrote: post #121
stephbook wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I long for the day when they will supervise CI/CD systems. Trying to fix syntax errors in strong interpolation on a 5-minute-delay loop is hell.

Just create a skill for it -> I call mine `babysit`. It spins up a subagent that polls it every x minutes and auto-fixes it until it's green. I already continue with the next task while it does that in the background

I do this with our AI PR review checks. We have AI review every PR and commits to PRs... which can cause long running loops of commitfix.

So my agent just listens for green checks and no PR comments and loops until those conditions are met.

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