The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI

Brooks's Law—the principle that adding more people to a late software project makes it later—remains relevant in the age of AI agents and LLMs, though its nature has evolved. While AI agents eliminate traditional bottlenecks like onboarding and coordination overhead, they introduce new challenges: sequential tasks remain sequential, and poorly orchestrated agents can waste effort by overwriting each other's work. The modern equivalent suggests that adding agents to projects with unclear requirements simply produces wrong answers faster.