Re:The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI
by sgillen on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @01:13PM
(#50262386)
Yes the latest models are pretty good at orchestration, if you instead open 9 chats and let them loose on your code base on different tasks without telling them about eachother you get a mess. If you tell one agent to spawn subagents as needed to do the implementation you get much better results.
Mm, I think this is quite overstated in the era of Opus 5 / Sol.
What we actually see is that agents are much better at coordinating than humans. Numbers from OpenAI show 4x the agents gives 2x the speed.
Of course, for truly single-threaded tasks you can’t gain much by parallelizing, but ask Fable/Astra to chop a big task into small pieces, write the APIs first, then sub-agents take what’s behind the API, and you’ll usually get a much better speedup than if you asked humans to work this way.
In practice most big projects have crux choke points and then fanout migration/buildout phases.
Even on the cruxes, where you need a single decision, agents don’t have ego and so you can get speedups by eg. asking for 10 clean room implementations of the same problem, and have a judge model pick the best; this can let you go much faster, and no human team would put up with that collaboration model.