AI Council
The AI conference for humans who ship
Meet the top AI infrastructure minds where architects of AI share what actually works.
Wes McKinney will be presenting on “The Mythical Agent-Month.”
Abstract: Code generation is converging to free. Agents run in parallel. A single developer can burn 10 billion tokens a month. So why isn’t the software getting better? Drawing on Fred Brooks’s fifty-year-old Mythical Man-Month, this talk argues agentic engineering is repeating software’s oldest mistakes at machine speed: generating technical debt at unprecedented scale while making scope creep unstoppable. Agents can demolish accidental complexity but struggle to distinguish this from essential complexity, and they produce new accidental complexity if not kept in check. The bottleneck was never typing speed. Design taste and knowing when to say “no” were always the hard part. Agents are making this paradoxically even harder.
