Those who haven't read Mythical Man Month are doomed to repeat it. I don't recall anywhere in the book where it states that the problems described in its essays don't apply to you if you're working with dozens of the most intelligent engineers in the world who can produce code in hours instead of days.

I was discussing this with someone else and used the analogy of nuclear energy. Although nuclear plants are highly complex and use forces that have only been understood for the last hundred years, at the end of the day it's still boiling water to create steam to spin a turbine, and nothing about nuclear innovation can engineer away the laws of thermodynamics.

Agents have and will continue to drastically change how we develop code, but it's my belief that drastically changing our software practices to speed up development just means we're going to hit engineering limits faster, rather than being able to overcome those limits entirely.

I was telling a friend something similar last week.

Unless, or perhaps until, we figure out how to use LLMs effectively at the organization level we're still going to be limited to the "slime mold" level of organizational intelligence.

Will that happen? Most likely, but will it take a generation or ten? I suspect it'll be far harder for society to adapt at that level. We've had Mythical Man Month for decades yet software managers continue repeating the same mistakes.

Because of that the idea of OAI and Anthropic just moving to in-house product development makes sense.