OReilly/Event/26/03/AI Codecon/1320 Mythical Agent-Month Wes McKinney

• The Mythical Agent-Month

  • Overview

    • Duration: 20 minutes
    • Slot (EDT): 13:20–13:40
    • Speaker: Person/Wes McKinney
    • Event: OReilly/Event/26/03/AI Codecon

  • Description

    • Parallel Claude Code sessions, new languages, faster shipping—vs agents chasing tails in bloated codebases they helped create.
    • Fred Brooks revisited: adding people (or agents) to late work; agents remove accidental complexity but can’t distinguish accidental from essential, generating complexity at machine speed.
    • When code is cheap, knowing what to build—and not to build remains the decisive skill.