Amazon's AI boom is creating mess of duplicate tools and data inside the company

I have found this at a different scale in our company: agents keep writing the same private static utility methods over and over again without checking for it in existing code.

Sometimes, I'll catch it writing the same logic 2x in the same PR (recent example: conversion of MIME type to extension for images). At our scale, it is still possible to catch this and have these pulled out or use existing ones.

I've been mulling whether microservices make more sense now as isolation boundaries for teams. If a team duplicates a capability internally within that boundary, is it a big deal? Not clear to me.

http://archive.today/06p42

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.