Mythical Man Month

Fortunate to be reminded of this right now, especially the pull-quote about conceptual integrity.

This is the reason why AI-assisted programming has not turned out to be the silver bullet we have been hoping for, at least yet. Muddled prompting by humans gets you the Homer Simpson car you wished for, that will eventually collapse under its own weight.

I've been thinking a lot about Programming as Theory Building [0] as the missing piece in AI-assisted engineering. Perhaps there are approaches which naturally focus on the essence while ignoring the accidents, but I'm still looking for them. Right now the state of the art I see ignores both accident and essence alike, and degrades the ability to make progress.

Please inform me if there are any approaches you know that work! And lest this sound pessimistic, far from it. This state of affairs is actually intoxicatingly motivating. Feels like we have found silver, and just need to start learning to mould bullets.

[0] Another classic required reading of the industry https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf

Notably, his essay “no silver bullet” states that there has never been a new technology or way of thinking or working that has led to a 10X increase in the speed of software development.

That was true for almost seventy years until roughly last year.

AI is the silver bullet - my output is genuinely 10X what it was before claude code existed.

As a software engineering manager, I always look to staff up a project at the beginning as much as possible, looking for doing as much in parallel up-front as we can. If some things take longer than expected, then I already have a team of engineers with all the context since the project kicked off that can help each other with any longer running tasks. An engineer that has completed a smaller chunk of work can help out with the items on the critical path, for example.

The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.

For the human makers of things, the incompletenesses and inconsistencies of our ideas become clear only during implementation.

Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.

There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement in productivity.

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These ideas still apply very well to modern society. but, Personally, I hope science advances to the point where nine women really can have a baby in parallel.

We may need that to prevent demographic collapse and keep the pension system from running out of money.

It’s easy to see the conceptual integrity in good software, architecture, design and movies — or the lack of this quality in the bad ones.

Vibe coded software is the Marvel green screen movie equivalent.

"The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination." -FB

Look, I read it and loved it 25 hyears ago.

Fred Brooks wrote that book when they were programming IBM operating systems in assembly language.

Times have really, really changed - do not pay attention to the messages of this book unless for historical fun.