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LeCompteSftware 2 days ago

Brooks's Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

With the obvious preface of "thoughtlessly adding." Of course it's not a real law, it's a tongue-in-cheek observation about how things have tended to go wrong empirically, and highlights the unique complexity of adding manpower to software vs. physical industry. Regardless, it has been endlessly frustrating for people to push AI/agentic development by highlighting short-term productivity, without making any real attempt to reconcile with these serious long-term technical management problems. Just apply a thick daub of Claude concealer, and ship.

Maybe people are right about the short-term productivity making it worthwhile. I don't know, and you don't either: not enough time has elapsed to falsify anything. But it sure seems like Fred Brooks was correct about the long-term technical management problems: adding Claudes to a late C compiler makes it later.

  The resulting compiler has nearly reached the limits of Opus’s abilities. I tried (hard!) to fix several of the above limitations but wasn’t fully successful. New features and bugfixes frequently broke existing functionality.
https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler
dannersy 2 days ago | parent [-]

Honestly, it isn't particularly good at greenfield stuff. It's a mess all around. Seeing the claims that AI is better at code than humans has been a failure for my direct experience and those I know who work at larger companies. Incident and regression rates are up exponentially and requiring more people to play wack-a-mole.