The Mythical Man-Month

Yeah.

The Mythical Man-Month does not apply to LLM agents.

Like, they don't need to communicate with a number of other things to complete the task.

So they're parallelizable in a way that human beings are not.

His work spans software architecture, cloud systems, engineering leadership, team design, and practical decision-making in software delivery.

Milan writes and teaches through the tech world with Milan, and he's the author of The Laws of Software Engineering, which is the book that inspired this interview.

Milan, welcome to Software Engineering Radio.

Is there anything I missed that you'd like to add?

Of course, in discussion with maybe your senior colleagues, you figure out like they already know some of these, but maybe not all.

Or maybe they know the thing, but they don't know that this thing have the name.

So I basically collected these things in some kind of a notebook.

And after some time, I figured out that some people already gave names to these laws.

Right.

And so the idea is Brooks Law, which comes from a book called The Mythical Man Month, says adding manpower to late software projects always makes it later.

Yeah, because there's more toasts.

Because there's more communication channels and now like everything bogs down in communication.

That's kind of my point.

Another cool thing, this is from Frederick Brooks, Mythical Man Month.

Software is really unique in its ability to attract people.

It's not like building an airplane or building a product or building a car or something physical.