Comment by causalityltd

Apart from rediscovering all the problems with distributed systems, I think LM teams will also rediscover their own version of the mythical man-month, and very quickly too.

There were 3 core insights: adding people makes the project later, communication cost grows as n^2, and time isn't fungible.

For agents, maybe the core insight won't hold, and adding a new agent won't necessarily increase dev-time, but the second will be worse, communication cost will grow faster than n^2 because of LLM drift and orchestration overhead.

The third doesn't translate cleanly but i'll try: Time isn't fungible for us and assumptions and context, however fragmented, aren't fungible for agents in a team. If they hallucinate at the wrong time, even a little, it could be a equivalent of a human developer doing a side-project during company time.

An agent should write an article on it and post it on moltbook: "The Inevitable Agent Drift"