The Mythical Man-Month in the age of AI
Last weekend I watched four people desperately trying to get a laptop to connect to a screen. I was happily observing their efforts, with zero intent to join in.
But someone nudged me: can't you have a look at it?
My reply: "Haha sorry no! My experience is that adding more people will not solve this problem any quicker".
I was of course -- indirectly -- referring to Brooks's Law:
"Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."
It was formulated by computer scientist Frederick P. Brooks Jr. in his 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month, based on his experience managing the IBM OS/360 project.
However I got to thinking. Does this still hold up in the age of AI agents and LLMs?
At first glance, you’d think no. The traditional bottlenecks -- onboarding time, endless stand-ups, and office politics -- disappear overnight. An AI agent is up to speed in milliseconds and doesn't demand a coffee break.
But when you look closer, and the law hasn't vanished. It just mutated.
The famous "Baby Problem" remains: nine agents still can’t deliver a baby in one month. Sequential tasks are still sequential.
Overhead hasn't disappeared; it shifted: instead of managing people, you are now managing agents. Someone still needs to define "done", review the code, catch hallucinations, and stitch the pieces together.
Throw nine autonomous agents at a single codebase without crystal-clear orchestration, and they will happily rewrite each other's work in a high-speed loop.
Maybe the 2026 update to Brooks’s Law should be:
"Adding agents to a project with unclear requirements gets you the wrong answer faster."
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