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Mythical Man Month

martinfowler.com

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Re: Mythical Man Month

#151

Post by eloisant »

hansvm wrote: post #47
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.

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 a 10x in areas where I'm not very good/experimented at. Or perhaps even more. For example I'm mostly a backend developer, I used to be a full stack dev a long time ago so I know how to make front-end but my knowledge there is outdated, I've forgotten half of it, it takes me time to get back to it. I'm also not good at creating a web UI so in the past I was using frameworks like Bootstrap or Foundation, leading to sites that looked good but very generic.

Now with AI, I can easily create a nice looking front-heavy web app.

See this for example: https://github.com/erwan/sovereign-cards-database

I would never have bothered doing that without AI.

In areas I'm more familiar with, like back-end software, it's maybe more of the 2x or 3x.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#152

Post by eloisant »

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…

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.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#153

Post by gobdovan »

>He argues that conceptual integrity comes from both simplicity and straightforwardness

If you want to follow this advice, I think Leslie Lamport's formulation is the most concrete. His version is:

- Write down a small model of what you are about to build before building it.

- Try to see how that model could fail. If it still looks good, either make the spec/design doc/model clearer and more concrete, or start writing the code.

- If plain text gets too vague, use math. If you want tools to check it, use TLA+ with TLC or Apalache. Quint and stateright.rs are nearby tools in the same area.

---

Materials:

- TLA+ videocourse by Lamport: https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/video/videos.html

- How to win a Turing Award speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw3gsBms-f8

- Thinking above the code: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4Yp3j_jk8Q

Re: Mythical Man Month

#154

Post by globular-toast »

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.

Even assuming you are correct, does your "output" being 10x actually mean "a 10x increase in the speed of software development"?

Re: Mythical Man Month

#155

Post by strgcmc »

timacles wrote: post #148
CraigJPerry wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10x what? 10x revenue? 10x features shipped? Whats the measure, is it 10x speed of dev like parent comment? Because an unqualified 10x could mean 10x SLOC which is trivial with an agent but has negative value. Assuming 10x on the speed of dev, Is the vscode repo a decent example? Recently they've been all in on AI augmented development so i'm thinking they'd be a reasonable subject? How do you isolate out what counts…

Guarantee it’s the same story I get from all my friends/co workers who are now 10x… they are 10 times faster at starting random projects that get to 80% done that they can’t finish, so they immediately move on to the next project because their velocity is so high

From a software quality or software engineering POV --> this is clearly not building durable value, not scalable, etc. So I'd agree with you there.

But from the POV of say, a young startup company looking for PMF and navigating the ambiguities involved with trying to figure out what is the "right thing" to build that will appeal/delight/convince-people-to-pay --> being 10X faster at shipping 80% done projects, is actually incredibly, unfathomably valuable of a superpower. And it is also rationally the "right thing" to do, to make lots of cheap bets and fail/learn fast.

I find that many folks on my team (I am a manager/leader of small-to-mid size eng org), struggle with accepting the nuances of knowing the difference between different projects (where same team may need to do both kinds of work, all the time and in parallel):

- "Hey, the company needs, and you and I both agree, that this situation calls for building/renovating a skyscraper --> please design a fucking strong/safe/reliable skyscraper and don't take any shortcuts, this requires 'real' engineering"

- Vs, "Hey, the company isn't sure what it needs, and neither you nor I know any better either, so let's try a bunch of different shacks/sheds/treehouses/whatever, until we find something that has traction / makes us money (and it's okay if the shed collapses -- so long as the business knows this too, that it wasn't meant to be a load-bearing, skyscraper-esque thing anyways)"

I won't get into the rabbit hole of talking about dealing with bad business leaders, who want a skyscraper but expect to pay the price of a shack/shed. Let's assume that we are talking about the type of companies (maybe the minority) that are reasonable enough to know and acknowledge the difference. Then what is the game-theoretic/rational thing for them to do, and how does this 10X idea express itself? That's where my argument is coming from.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#156

Post by Deeds67 »

bronson wrote: post #149
Deeds67 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you're nitpicking on whether or not LLMs make you faster by saying that working on existing code is easier than starting from scratch? I think you've missed the point.

No, they're saying that it was misleading. OP said "I'm building an open source Google Photos alternative" and surprisingly didn't say "based on Immich". This dramatically changes the evaluation of "open-noodle". We're now in an era where LoC is easy and design is hard[1]. Starting with an existing project means using an existing design, where someone else has already made many/most of the difficult decisions. 10Xing…

What are you debating here? I replied to a comment asking for examples of public work displaying that LLMs can 10x a human's output.

https://opennoodle.de/roadmap/

Look at what I built, these are not all simple designs.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#157

Post by timacles »

bronson wrote: post #149
Deeds67 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you're nitpicking on whether or not LLMs make you faster by saying that working on existing code is easier than starting from scratch? I think you've missed the point.

No, they're saying that it was misleading. OP said "I'm building an open source Google Photos alternative" and surprisingly didn't say "based on Immich". This dramatically changes the evaluation of "open-noodle". We're now in an era where LoC is easy and design is hard[1]. Starting with an existing project means using an existing design, where someone else has already made many/most of the difficult decisions. 10Xing…

Pretty much every example in this thread is "I forked some existing project and made changes I like".

The main thing they dont realize is: 1. These are mostly superficial changes. 2. The only thing they 10xed is their ability to "start" on something. 3. They have not produced actual value. Their project/fork is just a version they think they prefer. But It is less maintainable, and less robust/useful for others due to its specificity.

My observations is that consistently these arguments are made by: inexperienced devs who simply dont understand what it takes to produce value in the real world.

LLMs CAN 10x you (in very specific areas like prototyping), IF you understand how to deliver this value, but that is the hard part. It has always been the hard part.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#158

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

eloisant wrote: post #152
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…

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 by AI.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#159

Post by danieldc »

paperpunk wrote: post #100
rafaelmn wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have a harness for Claude Code "hooks" ( https://code.claude.com/docs/en/hooks ) which in my case execute a Go tool in a separate project which runs changes made by claude through a validator with various rules that can be defined (regex, semgrep, etc.). They can warn claude or they can block changes outright. When I find claude is using tools or approaches that I have replaced with more specific ones, I ask claude…

Is it open-source/ can you share it?

Re: Mythical Man Month

#160

Post by smartmic »

hansvm wrote: post #47
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.

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 is worth to have a detailed look into the original essay and its arguments. My interpretation is https://smartmic.bearblog.dev/no-ai-silver-bullet/
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