Software Engineering on Alex's Blog

The new software tar pit and how AI made it stickier

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Is the tar pit better or worse now?

I keep coming back to Brooks’s opening picture of big software projects as prehistoric tar pits, where teams got stuck and sank deeper the more they struggled. He wrote that in 1975. Rereading it in 2026, I wanted to know whether the pit had got better or worse. It is the same pit at the same depth. What changed is the water on top of it. It is clearer than it has ever been, and a pit that looks shallow is a more dangerous pit.

Ten subagents in an hour is 1975 asking for ten developers in a month

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The first thing I reach for

The last chapter was about mistaking speed for progress. This one is about the first thing I reach for when speed is not enough. The work is massive and behind, so I split it up. Brooks wrote a whole chapter on why that does not work, but clearly, the version of me that opens three parallel agent sessions at once has not read it carefully enough.

The Mythical Man-Month, is this outdated in the age of AI?

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Why I went back to it

I still remember someone proposing to add people to a project that was already late. It is a reasonable instinct, the work is behind, so find more hands. Someone else stepped in and mentioned Brooks’s The Mythical Man-Month. Nobody was added. The book won the argument. The project took a few more months anyway, and I cannot remember what we said it would take at the start.