> The issue here is communication, as the number of people grows, the number of communication paths between those people grows exponentially.
Exponentially? Quadratically I would say.
Mythical Man Month
181–190 of 219 posts
Re: Mythical Man Month
#182Notably, 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 is verifiably a flood of new projects. The selfhosted subreddit had to put in checks coz too many people were complaining about vibecoded slop.
iOS submissions are way up.
What I havent seen is existing open source people develop 10x faster.
Or, anything vibe coded get popular which wasnt just a gimmick.
Just a tsunami of slop.
Re: Mythical Man Month
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 b…
> There is certainly no sign of these companies becoming more productive. Oh, if you look at real signs, like uptime and number of bugs, they are becoming very clear. But it's not clear how much of it is caused by the layoffs and how much is because of LLMs.
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Re: Mythical Man Month
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of my work has been in core infra at large companies. Having the code written faster does not change rollout velocity all that much... It does help with signals and idiot proofing on bugs but when things break and cost real (very real) dollars AI is not an explanation. In that instance, its not even close. Development might be 10-20 percent of the actual work to get a change out.
AI can also speed up the release processes
To an extent it can help reduce wasteful steps. But there's nothing AI can do that can make it less irresponsible to reduce soak times, stagger the release across many environments, etc.
Re: Mythical Man Month
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Just that you're treating LoC and complexity as useful metrics, when these days those come for free. Or for $3 per Mtok, almost free.
Re: Mythical Man Month
#186Earlier 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?
My friend who has never taken a programming class (or even touched an IDE before AFAIK) has now put a small app into production. Complete frontend + backend + database. Yes, it is an internal app, but it works and everyone loves it. Does that count as an example? (Also I absolutely expect him to need help at some point, but so far it has taken his project from absolutely impossible to 3 weeks of work in between work,…
My friend who has never taken a programming class did the same 10 years ago.
Re: Mythical Man Month
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, I get that. I'm just saying it seems wrong to throw up minority examples. Nobody is pumping out AAA games at speed with LLMs, nor is anyone claiming to do so. There will likely always be some areas where LLMs are bad or useless. How many people are writing crud apps using mainstream languages vs COBOL though? You don't need 100% silver bullet 1-shot everything, just to recognize the signals that for many use c…
Definitely the safe space is expanding but how fragile and expensive is this expansion? AI requires a larger amount of fragile resources to work as opposed to an editor, keyboard and a human. It some sense it’s a bit like the bitcoin revolution that slowed down once transaction times ballooned out. And blockchains didn’t replace databases as expected. Probably for very good reasons: resources required v. results deli…
The resources are definitely an issue. I'm still sucking from the corporate teat, but my hope is that by the time the frontier race slows down and they tighten the screws too much, the local models will be good enough. It sounds like recent local models are already getting pretty good for normal duties, but honestly, if it all goes away tomorrow, that's fine too. I'll go back to the old ways. I'd miss the informational capabilities more than the coding capabilities, but I'm no stranger to man pages.
As an aside, I still think there's a place for blockchains. They're not a good replacement for a typical database, but I think some of the concepts are useful. The idea of distributed ledgers and smart contracts have a lot of applications IMHO, particularly in government. The traceability of transactions seems like a great fit to enable transparency of government spending. Of course, governments are allergic to that idea for the usual reasons, but it's still a nice idea. Distributed computing is hard, and it's a shame that blockchains were usurped by crypto bro scams. I'm still rooting for the folks who are trying to push distributed technology forward though.
Re: Mythical Man Month
#188Fortunate to be reminded of this right now, especially the pull-quote about conceptual integrity. This is the reason why AI-assisted programming has not turned out to be the silver bullet we have been hoping for, at least yet. Muddled prompting by humans gets you the Homer Simpson car you wished for, that will eventually collapse under its own weight. I've been thinking a lot about Programming as Theory Building [0]…
> Muddled prompting by humans gets you the Homer Simpson car you wished for
Well put! Now that we have a magic tool that can generate tokens on demand, the quality of the underlying idea gains enormous importance relative to the code. Tokens are cheap. Good ideas are not.
I would like to hope that some people take advantage of this newfound agentic power to create better theories. But there's a sizable population that seems intent on generating more and more code, regardless of quality.
Re: Mythical Man Month
#189Notably, 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.
It's mostly slop. And sometimes slop is good enough. But Fred Brooks was talking about actual software systems, not a shop front for an amateur wine importer.
Re: Mythical Man Month
#190Fortunate to be reminded of this right now, especially the pull-quote about conceptual integrity. This is the reason why AI-assisted programming has not turned out to be the silver bullet we have been hoping for, at least yet. Muddled prompting by humans gets you the Homer Simpson car you wished for, that will eventually collapse under its own weight. I've been thinking a lot about Programming as Theory Building [0]…
Imo the main benefit of AI is allowing faster experimentation and more parallelism, as well as faster iteration.