HN

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  nemo1618
  It's interesting to revisit Brooks' "surgical team" in light of AI. For example, I frequently have Claude act as a "toolsmith", creating bespoke project-specific tools on the fly, which are then documented in Skills that Claude can use going forward. What has changed is that a) One person (or rather, one person-AI hybrid) plays all the roles within the surgical team, and b) Internal frictions such as cost, development time, and communication overhead have all been dramatically slashed.
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  alasdair_
  Notably, his essay “no silver bullet” states that there has never been a new technology or way of thinking or working that has led to a 10X increase in the speed of software development.That was true for almost seventy years until roughly last year.AI is the silver bullet - my output is genuinely 10X what it was before claude code existed.
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  nvader
  Fortunate to be reminded of this right now, especially the pull-quote about conceptual integrity.This is the reason why AI-assisted programming has not turned out to be the silver bullet we have been hoping for, at least yet. Muddled prompting by humans gets you the Homer Simpson car you wished for, that will eventually collapse under its own weight.I've been thinking a lot about Programming as Theory Building [0] as the missing piece in AI-assisted engineering. Perhaps there are approaches which naturally focus on the essence while ignoring the accidents, but I'm still looking for them. Right now the state of the art I see ignores both accident and essence alike, and degrades the ability to make progress.Please inform me if there are any approaches you know that work! And lest this sound pessimistic, far from it. This state of affairs is actually intoxicatingly motivating. Feels like we have found silver, and just need to start learning to mould bullets.[0] Another classic required reading of the industry https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf
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  jh00ker
  As a software engineering manager, I always look to staff up a project at the beginning as much as possible, looking for doing as much in parallel up-front as we can. If some things take longer than expected, then I already have a team of engineers with all the context since the project kicked off that can help each other with any longer running tasks. An engineer that has completed a smaller chunk of work can help out with the items on the critical path, for example.
• Nifty3929
  I love this book, and I often recommend it to new folks on my team. I used to carry a few extra paperback copies to give away, just in case.
• jeffreygoesto
  "Simple made Easy" is a nice add-on, the first half is the philosophical part and a classic. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4
• manoDev
  It’s easy to see the conceptual integrity in good software, architecture, design and movies — or the lack of this quality in the bad ones.Vibe coded software is the Marvel green screen movie equivalent.
• sutro
  "The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination." -FB
• ForOldHack
  "The most influential." is relative, I read it when it came out, and I had been programming for more than 20 years, there were 2 professors on the facility who were there... and confirmed much of it. 10 years later, while dipping back into academia again, it was a recommend read, so I read it again. 20 years later, the same thing happened... it influenced multiple generations of programmers and managers world wide. I am willing to read it again, and yes, it really is that influential.
• fukinstupid
  [flagged]
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  jdw64
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  wewewedxfgdf
  Look, I read it and loved it 25 hyears ago.Fred Brooks wrote that book when they were programming IBM operating systems in assembly language.Times have really, really changed - do not pay attention to the messages of this book unless for historical fun.