Comment by ayewo

> If I want to speed things up, I remove people from the team. Everything gets easier.

How did you land on this approach? From someone you learned from or from a seminal book like Mythical Man Month [1]?

> This was true long before AI. With AI the difference is just a lot bigger. It exposes team inefficiencies quite mercilessly. We have a big glaring issue with the current AI tools not being to suitable for usage by multiple users. All interactions are one on one. Which means hand offs between tools and people are bottle necked on people communicating with each other. So, any issues there with people delaying, gate keeping, etc. become very visible.

Shopify has also struggled with this and their solution is two-fold: move everything inside a monorepo they call World [2]. The do a number of things to make things legible for AI agents like e.g. having a comprehensive CI/CD system in place, documenting tribal knowledge in AGENTS.md which in aggregate turn out to also be good for humans new to the monorepo.

Then, they built an internal AI agent on top of this monorepo process that is useable from Slack. They call the AI agent River [3] and in this system all chatbot exchanges are public by default.

1: Fred Books was one of the first to point out that adding another team member to speed up a late project will produce the inverse effect of making that project later (because of coordination tax).

2: https://shopify.engineering/under-the-river

3: https://x.com/tobi/status/2053121182044451016