[HN Gopher] The mythical AI-agent month
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The mythical AI-agent month
Author : ingve
Score : 4 points
Date : 2026-01-31 22:14 UTC (47 minutes ago)
(HTM) web link (thetechenabler.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (thetechenabler.substack.com)
| gemmarate wrote:
| 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.
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