Brooks's Law Survives the AI Age: Nine Agents Still Can't Deliver a Baby in One Month

The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI

Jan van den Berg revisits Frederick Brooks's 1975 law — adding manpower to a late software project makes it later — and asks whether it still holds when the manpower is AI agents. Onboarding and stand-ups vanish, but the bottlenecks just move: someone must define "done," review code, catch hallucinations, and orchestrate the pieces. Nine autonomous agents on one codebase without clear direction will rewrite each other's work in a high-speed loop.