The essay The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI applies Brooks’s warning about adding people to late projects to agent collaboration. It argues that reduced onboarding costs do not eliminate sequential tasks, acceptance criteria, code review or integration. Agents working on the same code without clear roles can overwrite each other’s changes. This is a management argument rather than a measured universal law: assess how divisible the work is and establish ownership of changes before increasing parallelism.
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Coordination costs remain with AI agents
Adding agents does not remove sequential work or review obligations