There is no 'AI' in 'Team'
Scott Werner, who is frustratingly good at writing what I'm thinking about LLMs, has a new post out where he compares being an "agentic" coder to being an octopus, with each arm being a separate instance of Claude Code independently thinking and acting on its own. It's a good post and you should read it.
Two developers on one codebase is like two octopuses sharing one coral reef. Technically possible. Practically ridiculous. Everybody's arms getting tangled. Ink everywhere. The coral is screaming (coral doesn't scream, but work with me here).
The more time I spend with coding agents, the more I become convinced that they are damn-near incompatible with working in teams. I've suggested this before, but I really think more people should be chewing on this. The bottleneck for software teams—the thing that's always made them less than the sum of their parts—is the handshake problem. It's the one thing from The Mythical Man-Month everyone remembers: "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."
For the last 50 years, this has been (quite reasonably) understood as the number of humans on a team. That the number of relationships between those humans in an organization's design could be used to compute an approximate productivity tax on the collective's broader efforts to encode some kind of intention into software.
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