Brooks’s law was about humans, but the spirit still applies: the real bottleneck is how much of the system a human can keep in their head at once. Most agent setups I’ve seen don’t reduce that load, they increase it: more surface area, more glue code, more boilerplate that nobody fully understands.
The only places they’ve worked well for me are roles where you can afford to throw away 80% of the output (migrations, test stubs, scaffolding) and keep a tight human-owned core. Treat agents like interns you fire every night, not teammates you trust with the architecture.
This exactly matches my experience. I also suspected that it was my higher threshold for code quality but Ai generated code is just not worth adding to a project without very strict reviews, unless it's non production and I want to fully give the project over to Ai
I agree that Brooks's Law applies here, but I think it bites at a different level than suggested.
An engineer coordinating AI agents can achieve coherent architecture. The bottleneck is less about human-AI coordination; it's that the inert organizational structures won't adapt.
The engineer now has to coordinate with AI agents and all the legacy coordinating roles that were designed for a different era. All these roles still demand their slice of attention, except now there are more coordination points, not fewer - AI agents themselves, new AI governance roles, AI policy committees, compliance officers, security assessments...
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 21.3 ms ] threadThe only places they’ve worked well for me are roles where you can afford to throw away 80% of the output (migrations, test stubs, scaffolding) and keep a tight human-owned core. Treat agents like interns you fire every night, not teammates you trust with the architecture.
An engineer coordinating AI agents can achieve coherent architecture. The bottleneck is less about human-AI coordination; it's that the inert organizational structures won't adapt.
The engineer now has to coordinate with AI agents and all the legacy coordinating roles that were designed for a different era. All these roles still demand their slice of attention, except now there are more coordination points, not fewer - AI agents themselves, new AI governance roles, AI policy committees, compliance officers, security assessments...