alt Hacker NewsThe problem with human labor is that, as an organization scales, the amount of work any individual in the system can do shrinks due to the coordination problem.
Coordination consumes a larger and larger amount of employee time to the point that, in the absolute largest organizations, the vast majority of employee time is internal coordination vs. actual improvement/selling of the customer offering.
So if you go from 100 employees to 1,000 employees, they can MAYBE do 4X the work. Not 10X like you'd think. And this effect gets even worse as you scale further.
So if an AI can do 10X more labor in a human day, and can coordinate instantaneously via a central context ledger (say a git repo), it doesn't just create 10X gains in productivity for large orgs. It creates a multiple of that 10X due to also removing the human coordination overhead.
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Yep, I call this the "Conway Overhead": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47270142
Don't you think AI itself is something that adds coordination overhead? A 1000 strong team with AI agents will feel like 5000-person company where more than 30% are not even at exception level - i.e. they need to be pulled along.
This is why having less people and more agents actually makes sense but the coordination problem remains either way.
And you cannot escape it because it is simply mathematical.