[quietbritishjim]

The point of the mythical man month is not that more people are necessarily worse for a project, it's just that adding them at the last minute doesn't work, because they take a while to get up to speed and existing project members are distracted while trying to help them.

It's true that a larger team, formed well in advance, is also less efficient per person, but they still can achieve more overall than small teams (sometimes).

[jsumrall]

Interesting point. And from the agents point of view, it’s always joining at the last minute, and doesn’t stick around longer than its context window. There’s a lesson in there maybe…

[saezbaldo]

The context window is the onboarding period. Every invocation is a new hire reading the codebase for the first time.

This is why architecture legibility keeps getting more important. Clean interfaces, small modules, good naming. Not because the human needs it (they already know the codebase) but because the agent has to reconstruct understanding from scratch every single time.

Brooks was right that the conceptual structure is the hard part. We just never had to make it this explicit before.

[quietbritishjim]

A small difference is that AGENTS.md gets added every time, so the evolution of that is essentially your agent's equivalent of team experience.