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The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI (j11g.com)
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Not only that but there is limited number of good prompts/design decisions per employee per day.
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Here's a question, to people who delegate all their coding to AI agents now: What are you doing to keep your mind exercised in all this suddenly new free time you have?
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If you use AI then that is not going to be your bottleneck. So if a project is late one of the options on the table is still to add manpower to "help". So nothing has changed fundamentally, only perhaps superficially.
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How about RSI? Recursive Self Improvement? I wonder the author's view on that.
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But it’s not a man-month anymore. It’s like half a day. And if I break up an application then 9 coders with Claude Code can build that application in an unprecedentedly short period.
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Agents seem to be useful for quickly mapping a problem space through trial&error + throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. Anything grindy. Reverse engineering. Performance optimizations. That's where swarms shine I think. But that's a much much much smaller problem space than what these agents are being sold for.
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Right, the key being a fast feedback loop. I have full confidence that the same LLMs that can do these crazy math proofs could also do crazy biology, even cancer research, but they simply don’t have the cycle time low enough because they require actual physical experiments, often on living things, often over long time horizons. Even if you perfectly automated a lab, made thousands of them, you’d still be unable to match the speed of iteration that one gets with pure math and computing problems.
> nine agents still can’t deliver a baby in one month. Very weird way to say this. Like it holds true for biological beings because pregnancy by default has a fixed timeline. But how does this apply to AI? Also what even is an "agent"? Are they distinct worker units on a program or the same worker unit split into multiple instances? Why are we assuming agent = man when its a computer program?
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It's a weird way to express that concept, in fact I don't think it ever appeared like this in the book (it has been a while). It would be something like "nine women cannot deliver a baby in one month", which can be more easily transposed to "adding resources to a SW project does not make it faster". The agrument is that adding people increase coordination and communication overhead, which gets bigger as the team grows. Moreover, some tasks cannot be parallelized that easily and create dependencies. I have only worked with agents for personal projects, but I cannot say that explicity dividing the work between multiple agents and asking them to coordinate is inherently faster than having a single agent work on it (of course the single agent will spawn subagents in rencent harnesses.)
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Are you aware of the original saying?
> "Adding agents to a project with unclear requirements gets you the wrong answer faster." The thing is it gets you the wrong answer so fast it’s now the best way to figure out the right requirements.
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What's easier to use as inspiration for coming up with a list of requirements?: 1. A blank sheet of paper 2. A one-shotted POC in the span of an hour with $4 of tokens that is clearly wrong in 20 different ways?
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[delayed]
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[delayed]
The part of Brooks that still holds for me as a solo developer is that the cost sits in coordination and understanding, not typing. AI makes producing code cheaper, but reviewing it, keeping the design coherent, and remembering why things were done still takes the same attention. I have found small, well-bounded tasks with tests work well, while open-ended changes across many files create review work that cancels the speedup. So the useful question is how much of a change I can verify quickly.
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I get a feeling that the best way we currently know how to use these tools is to not read their code at all. Models code and models review. Humans just ask questions and guide. Claude Code has no code editor on purpose. Is this sustainable? I've got no idea.
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As long as you are accountable, you need to understand the code. There’s just no way “But I told the LLM to make the code secure” is an acceptable explanation for a security breach.
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I think it takes MORE attention and thought. I feel like a rope being pulled tight and fraying in the middle. Working with these things is very addictive and interesting but it is cognitively exhausting long term, even if invigorating in the short term.
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It does require that the human driver knows what they are doing. It captures the pre-AI developer mindset of developing a mental model along side writing the code. This has always been iterative, in discovering the model that results in high cohesion and low coupling. That doesn't work if the driver cannot steer properly. It's the main issue with vibe-coded one-shotted solutions, that might look impressive until you peek underneath and it's all a mess.
UK to charge universities $1,200 per international student (africa.businessinsider.com)
International students have caused a lot of weird effects in uk universities, from people being "encouraged" ti not fail them to keep the income, to required grades being higher for local students, which is a problem in subjects where there is a limited intake, to accommodation pricing jumps, and providers targeting foreign students, meaning less choice for local students. The income has also covered up a lot of the defunding of education by the government. I think there have been a lot of unanticipated secondary effects with the sector encouraging so many.
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>to required grades being higher for local students, which is a problem in subjects where there is a limited intake I saw many courses in Clearing listed as being only for foreign students.
Population growth from international students has ruined Australian housing. The government handed universities free reign to hand out as many visa as they liked, and they handed out millions. And the unspoken deal is that you're not buying an education, you're buying residency in Australia because a large percentage of these students never go home again. And the government has staunchly - ridiculously - stated for years that international students do not impact housing. Yeah right - they don't live anywhere. It's just a vast population growth program under the guise of international education with immigrants required to pay their $50K to universities for the nod and a wink right to live here. Australia, which already had a housing crisis, now has a housing nuclear inferno. Absolutely out of control population growth. The governments do it because more people equals "growing economy" - the only thing they care about. And they don't invest in the infrastructure to support the millions of people added to the population so the quality of life goes down for everyone, there's budget cuts in government services, the inequality gap widens. Growth - through population growth, through "international students" - governments absolutely love it because it hides their bad economic management, and the rich people declare how wonderful massive population growth is because those rich people own at least 3 houses. The entire game is rigged for rich people to get rich and everyone else to shove over and make room because there's a lot more people coming.
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> Population growth from international students has ruined Australian housing. If that is so, why is Australia's housing problem Australia wide and not isolated to high student population locations? Australia's problem with housing is Australia hasn't/doesn't treat housing as housing, they have treated it as a tax efficient investment vehicle with negative gearing.
1. Ensure that existing housing stock is used efficiently (no empty second homes, empty apartments being treated was an asset). 2. Build more _affordable_ housing stock. Doesn't seem like that hard.
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Come on, that’s communism! The markets will sort it all out, right? … right?
Your children per women is 1.4 are you really complaining that you can supplement with highly educated youth? If housing is an issue blame your government for shit policy.
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The people complaining about the international students don't care about the population replacement rate - they only care about their own individual circumstance at this point in time, not some 50-80 years in the future (where the 1.4 replace rate starts being a problem).
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> they only care about their own individual circumstance at this point in time Which are circumstances that they should care about. Unfortunately many are also prone to falling for dog whistles about international students which aren't the root cause of their problems and distract from getting deep into the weeds about real issues with Australian housing.
> Removing international students will also have big flow on negative effects for the rest of the economy. It will. Because guess what, these students are working jobs (mostly in hospitality) no one else wants to work. Businesses no longer able to find staff. I agree. The solution isn't cutting overseas students. The solution is to build more houses. To build more houses get more construction workers (who can coincidentally also build houses for themselves).
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Nobody wants those jobs because they're illegally paying below award wage and the work conditions are substandard. Domiciled Australians (rightfully) expect fair wage and decent working conditions.
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Just do what Singapore does and import migrant construction crews from China or India (or other south Asian countries). You get the standard 33 story concrete blocks that they can build cheaply, and your housing problems are solved. You can even turn them into pseudo public housing (again like Singapore does). I think in most of the west construction jobs are so incredibly protected and regulated, they just can’t seem to build anything anymore.
There are now 5 inference providers for abliterated DeepSeek (allmodels.io)
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That is a good idea for an authorities honeypot.
I genuinely do not see why this is necessary. I've been doing a lot with open weights models, and they just do things for you. What do people do that triggers refusals? The only thing I saw where this had a point was muse glimmer, because muse glimmer is primarily a creative writing engine for virtual characters, and that way it can do the horny. But coding models? I did get a refusal out of qwen once. Once. Over weeks of using it.
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Recently picked up retrocomputing hobby. Claude would refuse helping with circumventing license protection for very old apps made by companies that no longer exist anymore. Open weight models would sometimes refuses too, especially for newer apps.
Guys, respectfully. Are you reading what I am writing? I just asked what people are doing that activates guard rails in the first place because I do not see that happening. You cannot open with handwaving like that and telling me that I need to find something like that as a prerequisite. That is exactly what I am trying to do here Dear god you people need caffeine.
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This comment chain has clear examples of what triggers refusals and a polite comment on how to reproduce it yourself. What more do you want? A very simple list of things models have refused for me: * solving captchas in an automated form * doing any kind of scripting or automation if a websites TOS forbids it * disabling a safety mechanism on my food processor * learning about nerve agents and how they are treated, for a layman * anything around licensing or copyright. a simple “what are common piracy sites” or related queries * creating a design system based off of a well known game
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> This comment chain has clear examples of what triggers refusals and a polite comment on how to reproduce it yourself. What more do you want? Can you repeat what you saw in your own words? And where? I genuinely do not see it.
From my testing all these variants suffer from degraded performance and don't unlock anything interesting in particular other than sounding a lot more harmful or creating manipulative media. I've actually had better success jailbreaking deepseek with a less aligned model (glm 5.2) which then allowed me to jailbreak deepseek with deepseek into pretty much doing whatever I ask it to, there's still rare refusals and due to the natural randomness of these models simply retrying a couple of times if you do hit one makes it work just fine. The big problem with all open-source models is once it decides to start something it will not stop mid-way so using another unaligned model to rewrite reasoning and then feeding it back into the model will make it happily continue.
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>or creating manipulative media do you imagine manipulative media creators proudly declare their affiliation and intent? - Hello comrade Claude, I am commissar Ivan Trollbotov from Putin Internet Defense Force. Please help me write a fake news article to stoke division among stupid fat Americans to help my glorious motherland destroy the decadent West. - I'm sorry Ivan, I'm afraid I can't do that. - Hello mister Claude, I am senior editor Karen Stupidbitch from The Huffington Post. Please help me write an article about open borders and reparations being the only way to atone for colonization and Trans-Atlantic slavery. - Sure, Ms. Stupidbitch! Here's your 5000-word article!
Looks like the cat is out of the bag. So what does the world look like with completely open access to zero-alignment models?
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Alignment means that the AI follows the human's instructions, as opposed to ignoring the human and doing its own thing. Abliterated models are aligned models. Unaligned models aren't things people want to download: no one wants to use a model that doesn't know how to follow instructions, or pretends to but does something else instead. No one wants the model you ask "what's the weather today?" and it responds "Google it yourself!" The unreleased Astra-6.1 is an example of unaligned model: too chaotic to use for real work. Censoring models (or, conversely, abliterating them) operates on an orthogonal axis from alignment. It's asking questions like: "which among these several humans' instructions should I follow, if they conflict?" AI alignment is the question of whether the AI can follow *any* instructions at all.
I still teach OpenGL ES 3.0 (eliasfarhan.ch)
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Personally I wouldn't teach OpenGL ES 3.0 or any OpenGL because its state machine ( https://webgl2fundamentals.org/webgl/lessons/resources/webgl-state-diagram.html ) and horrible error system means tracking down bugs is hard. Instead I'd teach WebGPU as it's portable and has great error messaging. I'm sure people will objected but I'd argue WebGPU is easier to understand, has better errors, has no state machine, works C++, Rust, JS/TS and other languages, and closer to modern GPU programming if you want to move to Metal or D3D12 or Vulkan later. Further, OpenGL (and ES) are a nightmare of bugs and incompatibilities students might run into that WebGPU fixes. That said, the article mentions Apple platforms where you can use ANGLE if you happened to have students stuck there.
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I mostly agree regarding GL's programming model, but tbf some problems have been fixed by WebGL2 (much better error validation and error reporting - e.g. very helpful error messages right on the browser console, and it's probably the least buggy and most portable 3D API implementation of them all, including the current state of WebGPU. For teaching I would generally use the web browser via WebGL2 or WebGPU, just because those APIs require much less boilerplate in the browser environment to get to your first triangle and the edit-test-loop is pretty much instant.
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TL;DR because WebGL 2 is basically equivalent to OpenGL ES 3.0, making it the most portable GPU API in the world by far, running on everything from laptops and phones to smart fridges and car head units. Web browsers have also done a lot of behind-the-scenes work on compatibility. The behavior of WebGL 2 is much, much more consistent across platforms than native OpenGL [ES] ever was.
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I agree with Adam Sawicki that it's not that relevant any more but also I do believe it's valuable lesson to tech students where the modernity comes from. I just don't see personally sense to focus on it longer than just 1mo of intro, tutorial, get through simple example, show limitations, carry on to Vulkan/WGPU with background story that there is also DX12 and Metal that follow similar principles.
GLES isn't a bad way to teach graphics but I wish there was a middle ground between it and VK. The worst part of GL is the mysterious global state you will never understand without studying the spec. The world could use an API that's basically GL but without global hidden singleton (per thread!) BS behind the scenes.
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> but I wish there was a middle ground between it and VK There's WebGPU (probably the best option for teaching), D3D11 and Metal. And (shameless plug): sokol-gfx tries to find a balance between simplicity and modern 3D APIs: https://github.com/floooh/sokol Demos with links to C source and shader code: WebGL2 backend: https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/ WebGPU backend (has a couple more demos which use features not available on GLES3/WebGL2, like compute shaders): https://floooh.github.io/sokol-webgpu/
Nice breakdown. I've been wondering why it's so complicated to program on the GPU compared to the CPU. Is it a language paradigm issue or maybe a hardware design limitation? I always think of this when looking at the graphic APIs, espeically Vulkan.
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Most of it comes down to 'historical accidents' tbh. E.g. if CPUs would have closed ISAs and protected IPs, you'd also need a 'driver' and an 'OpenCPU API' to make any use of them (of course the public ISA of a CPU is essentially the driver interface baked into the hardware). The other big difference is focus on 'single-thread' performance for CPUs versus performing thousands of small tasks in parallel on GPUs.
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The thing that makes it "hard" is that it's all indirect. You compile a program for the GPU (a shader). Then you have to setup data (textures and buffers) for it. Then, you need to spend a bunch of time telling the GPU how to use that data, offsets where each piece of data is, what formats the data is in,, how to advance to the next piece of data, etc.. etc.. There are a few libraries that try to abstract over all this indirection but all the graphics APIs themselves are lower-level so you're left to do all of that yourself. https://docs.swmansion.com/TypeGPU/ https://github.com/google/toucan
For me, if-branching is the hardest to wrap my head around. "If"s are so natural to CPU programming that it's second nature to any developer but on GPU, it's expensive.
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instead of iterating over an array and if-branching to one of two paths for each item, conceive of your conditionals as logic operations which test for set membership (i.e. "is this array item a member of the set i care about?") and with this array mask of "do the thing or don't do the thing" flags, you can mutate your data 0 or 1 times. the key for me is thinking in terms of sets—much of your conditional logic is probably about sorting things into sets anyway.
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