And Unix was mainly made by two people, it's astounding that as I get older, even tech managers don't know "the mythical man month", and how software production generally scales.
Thanks, I learned something, but the original point stands, 5 people is still not a lot and well within the scale where you could manage things within the team yourself without dedicated management and have first hand information flow.
I do agree with this idea in the sense that companies keep trying to add people to projects to do more things or complete projects sooner which ends up wasting a lot of effort. A more cost conscious way is to have smaller teams and let them more time to explore better approaches for longer.
> Sorry but a 99.999% of developers could not have built Unix. Or Winamp.
> Managers are crossing their fingers that devs they hire are no worse than average, and average isn't very good.
The problem is that that's the same skill required to safely use AI tools. You need to essentially audit its output, ensure that you have a sensible and consistent design (either supplied as input or created by the AI itself), and 'refine' the prompts as needed.
AI does not make poor engineers produce better code. It does make poor engineers produce better-looking code, which is incredibly dangerous. But ultimately, considering the amount of code written by average engineers out there, it actually makes perfect sense for AI to be an average engineer — after all, that's the bulk of what it was trained on! Luckily, there's some selection effect there since good work propagates more, but that's a limited bias at best.
Agree completely. Where I'm optimistic about AI is that it can also help identify poorly written code (even it's own code), and it can help rewrite it to be better quality. Average developers can't do this part.
From what I've found it's very easy to ask the AI to look at code and suggest how to make the code maintainable (look for SRP violations, etc, etc). And it will go to work. Which means that we can already build this "quality" into the initial output via agent workflows.
Speaking of myths, they were part of a team of 4-5 early contributors with the benefit of network effects via Bell Labs.[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix#History