[philwelch]

As I recall, “No Silver Bullet” fundamentally rested on the assumption that the subroutine was the last word in abstractions to make programming more efficient, which probably wasn’t even defensible at the time because Lisp had already been invented, and is even less defensible after the past several decades of programming language research. Brooks was still onto something when it came to irreducible complexity, but offloading complexity an LLM can tackle to the LLM still saves time.

One of the lesser discussed Brooks essays is actually the best description of AI-first development: the “surgical team”. It just turns out the surgeon is the only human, and like many modern surgeries, the surgeon is controlling a robot instead of operating by hand.

It would be interesting to reread The Mythical Man-Month and see how each essay applies to AI-first development.

[skydhash]

The sibling comment to yours (by rafterydj) makes a good point that the surgical team is necessary, but we have eliminated the positions and put the roles on the same person. It’s like the writer being the subject expert, the reviewer, the editor,… which we all knows leads to mediocre work.

[philwelch]

No, I think AI actually gets us closer to the surgical team than before. The purpose of the surgical team is to maximize the value of a single individual contributor. Before AI, the only way to do that was to surround him with assistants, which is inherently hierarchical and never really caught on probably for that reason. The value wasn't in the surgical team being entirely human, it was in optimizing for the surgeon's output by offloading tasks that are less valuable for him to perform. Offloading those tasks to AI works just as well without offending our egalitarian sensibilities.