Engineers Will Do Anything to Avoid Learning from History
Software engineers are rediscovering project management principles while working with AI agents, but they're rebranding them as novel ideas. The author argues that managing multiple AI agents is essentially program management, and engineers who never took TDD or PRD seriously are now grappling with defining requirements and reviewing AI-generated code. They predict a trend of reinventing waterfall and other established practices under sexier names, and recommend classic books like 'The Mythical Man-Month' and 'The Goal' to avoid repeating history.
Suddenly, waterfall is the thing to do.
- Avicebron
> You can make lots of money by making something appear novel and undiscovered, and consequently make yourself sound smart and cutting edge.
This is pretty much the crux of it. It's very similar to the strategy of undercutting a market with VC subsidies until it dies and can be replaced.
- Areading314
The central point, that working with agents is some tried and true variation of existing processes, is incorrect.
Managing agents has some similarities with EM and program management but a whole lot of other dimensions like token use, avoiding drift, successful concurrency at scale, variations in prompting, testing, evaluation, etc., not to mention that the agents are hyperintelligent coders with zero common sense and a penchant for extremely literal interpretation and ultra-verbosity.
- eadwu
This isn't an issue for engineers only, it is basically ingrained in the current system in the world. The problem is in simple terms; the fact that being a polymath is absurdly hard in today's world.
You can't not reinvent something if you don't know it exists in the first place.
The thing about software is that it slots nicely into every other field, making it a _very_ good base to work off of to get concepts (aka the modern bootleg polymath) that have likely been invented in other fields (with different names).
- bluehatbrit
I'm a hands on engineering leader for a team of about 20 engineers and I've been spending the past 6 months trying to get my team to understand just this.
On Friday we had a coffee hour to share how we've been working recently and they all seemed perplexed at the workflows I've been adopting. It seems natural to me as someone who's been a manager for some time now, but very alien to all those who've never gone down that path.
That's not to say my workflows are superior, but they're extremely different to some of my teams now. In reality it's just leaning heavily on things like prds, limiting communication between agents, etc.
- collinmcnulty
Relatedly, I fully expect the software business to fail to learn from (nearly) literally every other industry how to operate when your marginal costs are no longer zero. It drives me nuts the number of people in software who think that people in other industries are slow because they’re just not as smart as us, rather than because when it takes months to get a cast part made, it better be right the first time.
- patja
Seems like this could be categorized as yet another reason why software developers are not engineers.
- andai
>You can make lots of money by making something appear novel and undiscovered, and consequently make yourself sound smart and cutting edge. Nobody raises a round to apply a well understood discipline correctly.
I'm curious about this. I thought investors preferred safe bets?
On the other hand, I know that if you're too early, it can be impossible to make a business work (or even to pitch the idea in the first place).
Related: You can't tell people anything (2004)
https://web.archive.org/web/20091025030730/https://habitatch...
- cush
That’s because most Software Engineers aren’t Engineers, they’re computer science majors. It’s a completely different discipline.