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Mythical Man Month

martinfowler.com

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Re: Mythical Man Month

#171

Post by bobflorian »

eddyg wrote: post #140
alexpotato wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I do something similar, but tell the agent to write a recipe into a justfile . Then it can run `just` and get a self-documenting list of all the tooling for the project (just build, just test, etc.)

I do exactly the same thing

Re: Mythical Man Month

#172

Post by majormajor »

Pamar wrote: post #103
majormajor wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First counterexample that comes to mind: Rails vs 90s networked/shared line-of-business crud app development was a 10x factor. It also enabled a lot of internal tools that wouldn't have been worth doing without it. But after people's expectations adjusted it was just back on the treadmill. I don't think we've found a new steady-state yet, but I have some gut feeling guesses about where it's going to be.

90% of my my experience has always been dealing with large-ish corporate systems. I am in Europe, so YMMV even when talking about corporate instead of smaller scale projects. In my experience stuff like RAILS had negligible impact in my field because companies would always require solid backup from some big name vendor (MS, Oracle, IBM, Sun - back in the day, or even SAP). So most if not all the smaller silver bullet…

>90% of my my experience has always been dealing with large-ish corporate systems. I am in Europe, so YMMV even when talking about corporate instead of smaller scale projects.

>In my experience stuff like RAILS had negligible impact in my field because companies would always require solid backup from some big name vendor (MS, Oracle, IBM, Sun - back in the day, or even SAP).

>So most if not all the smaller silver bullets did not even make a blimp on the radar... and stuff like Java or .NET, while definitely better than C or COBOL... did not really deliver in terms of productivity boost (in part because, as noted in the message I am answering to, expectations kept growing at the same pace)

I've always been in small-to-midsized US corporate where Oracle etc were generally "no way are we gonna spend that much" but if someone can hack a decent thing together and run it on a spare server... that got traction 10-20 years ago.

I'm curious if those large corporations are more homegrown-code-by-AI-friendly than they would've been towards homegrown-Rails-app? A lot of the same potential problems exist.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#173

Post by bbaron63 »

When it comes to Brooks's Law and AI, will trying to incorporate AI tools into a late project, make the project later? Probably. I'm glad I'm close to retiring. AI has been a mixed blessing for me. I don't have the desire at this stage to do all the wrangling necessary to incorporate AI tools effectively into my workflow.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#174

Post by phforms »

moi2388 wrote: post #165

When I first heard about the book I accidentally read it as “Mythical Man Moth” and was deeply intrigued how this was about software development and immeasurably disappointed when I found out it was “month” instead.

Same, I always misread the title like this when it comes up and it amuses me for a while, since it sounds like it could be a book written by Franz Kafka.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#175

Post by mohamedkoubaa »

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?

There are some things around the corner. The best engineers aren't going 10x on Claude to build the next goofy SaaS app.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#176

Post by [deleted] »

freedomben wrote: post #114
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'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).

[deleted]

Re: Mythical Man Month

#177

Post by mohamedkoubaa »

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…

It's always worth remembering that code is a liability while software is the asset. Wiring 10x more code is accumulating 10x the liability, with the often unjustified belief that the software is 10x as valuable. It might be, but that's what the market is for.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#178

Post by SoftTalker »

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.

So why not fetch the ticket deterministically yourself as part of "staging" all the information that Claude will need? I.e. if Claude can't be relied upon to do something the way you want it done, take that task away from it, perform it some other way, and feed the results back to Claude.

I don't use AI much so I don't know if this is reasonable.

Re: Mythical Man Month

#180

Post by SoftTalker »

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?

They are paying Anthropic instead of you, because you aren't producing that value, Claude is.
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