| Indeed, when you remove bottlenecks, you just end up discovering new ones. One simple observation is that using agentic AI coding tools is not a multiplayer game currently. It's all one on one. I think this is a problem because a lot of development work actually involves multiple people. And to be effective as a team you need a shared context. If your agent has a different context than mine, we're not working together effectively. Having meetings to work around this is not a great solution. I call them synchronization bottle necks. Because that's what a meeting is. We drop all work to gather in a meeting where we share information and take decisions. And then once we are synced up, we continue work. OSS development happens mostly asynchronous tools. There are no meetings typically and hence less bottlenecks. But in large organizations, all decision making bogs down on communication overhead. Miscommunication and misaligned people become problematic. The bigger the team the worse it gets. It's an exponential. You end up spending most of your time in meetings where you are collectively blocking each other from getting stuff done. It's why startups are so effective when they are small and agile. With AI we can move at that speed as individuals. But not if we are spending most of our time in meetings trying to brief everyone on all the amazing stuff that happened when you were talking 1 on 1 to your agent. It's a lot of context to dump in a meeting; it obviously does not scale. The path to a solution might be very simple: why not have agents show up in team chat tools: make this properly multiplayer. Or, better, make the agentic coding tools proper team chat tools. Now we have shared context. And then maybe rethink the whole process while we're at it. The whole business of having standup meetings is a good example. Or planning meetings. All of that is valuable context for LLMs. So, make sure they are there or at least have access to the transcripts. Use AIs to summarize, provide digests, track issues, update statuses, etc. They are really good at the detail work. And you could do more radical things: instead of a scrum master, why not have a scrum agent? Why create issues manually? There's a lot of repetitive around issue and backlog management that POs still do manually. We haven't really scratched the surface of how AIs are going to change development. Some of this probably won't work. Or it will work completely differently. The point is we have yet to try most of this stuff and figure out better ways of working. |