What's this about?
dotey applied Conway's Law — an organisation ships a system shaped like its own communication structure — to AI-assisted development. Traditional software roles exist because the process demanded them and because no individual could hold every skill. He revisits Brooks's surgical-team proposal from The Mythical Man-Month, where design decisions concentrate in one person and everyone else supports, turning a mesh of communication paths into a star.
What exactly is the n(n-1)/2 problem?
Brooks's observation: n people have n(n-1)/2 communication paths, so coordination cost grows with the square of team size. Doubling a team roughly quadruples its communication overhead, which is why adding people to a late project makes it later. The surgical-team structure attacks this by collapsing the mesh into a star.
What's the community saying?
- The argument that agents make Brooks's surgical team newly practical, since the supporting roles that were expensive to staff can now be delegated.
- The counter-position, visible in the coding-expertise thread above: if juniors were the support roles and agents replace them, the surgeons of the next decade never get trained.
- dotey's own related note this week on technology selection — that he now picks the boring stable option over the new one, and that AI plus good test coverage makes swapping the foundation later much less costly.