The AI Mythical Man-Month: more agents won't fix weak coordination, just like more devs never did

rseroter · x · 2026-10-17

A BrokenRobot essay transplants Brooks's Law into the agent era: AI made code cheap, so the delivery bottleneck shifts to deciding, verifying and coordinating—organizational capabilities. Adding agents to a late project makes it later, just as adding developers always did. Examples include Cursor running hundreds of agents to build a million-line browser in a week and Anthropic's parallel-agent C compiler; Moonshot even markets Kimi K2.5's hundred-sub-agent swarms. Core claim: AI amplifies whatever coordination an organization already has—your agent teams mirror your existing structure.

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