The Mythical Man-Month

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…are mostly reflects the mentality of those who wrote it, instead of those who use it. Multi-million dollar software projects continue to fail decades after the Mythical Man Month was written. If programming as we know it disappears, few will mourn its loss, having suffered its consequences. Most people, including most programmers will just move onto the next great thing, whatever that is, and be empowered by it. Meanwhile, welcome to what technology has been doing to everyone else for the last 100+ years.

…ation. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures." blah blah blah -- The Mythical Man-Month, Frederick P. Brooks Jr. often quoted in cringe-inducing hand-wringing blog posts

…ects barely need human help. So I think projects will become increasingly polarized and become a zero-sum game. Brooks divided complexity into two types in The Mythical Man-Month: Essential Complexity and Accidental Complexity. Personally, I think AI has greatly reduced Accidental Complexity. However, the essential difficulty, the problem of modeling, still needs to be done by humans. Because AI has no physical embodiment, it's inherently hard for it to understand domains the way humans do. Learning about something is different from experiencing it. So I've decided to believe that vibe coding is also a valid approach. Supporters talk about compilers being deterministic, but LLMs are not dete…

I've been doing some reading recently around what the literature expects a professional software engineer to produce in a day. In ~1976 Mythical Man Month era it was around 5 lines of fully debugged assembly. Code Complete 2nd edition ~2004 bumped that up to 10-50 delivered lines of code per day. I found other estimates of around 20-60. I need to pull them altogether into a cited article. Based on that plus my own experience I think 100 lines per day of production-level, reviewed and debugged code was a reasonably higher target for a professional software engineer up until just a couple of years ago. Today I'm frequently pushing 2,000 to 4,000 - and that's not vibe coded junk (I can easily h…

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