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Comment by Fordec | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity, what was the path that the engineers have been taking? The limiting communication between agents to my mind is obvious to anyone who hasn't swallowed orthodoxy Agile development completely whole. And in my experience the people who have, are rarely the devs. Context switching, between agents, people or whoever, require ramp up time to relearn context. It's always slower and more expensive, other potential upsides about long term training or developers being more replaceable notwithstanding. But no agent gets long term training, not in a 1M context window.

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> obvious to anyone who hasn't swallowed orthodoxy Agile development completely whole.

What? One of the first principles in doing Lean and Agile correctly is limiting Work in Progress and avoiding context switching whenever possible.

Most organizations are not doing Agile correctly.

Everywhere I've worked claims to be doing Agile, but none of them have ever done anything to avoid context switching or limiting work in progress

if its like anything i've experienced in multiple places, they are just implementing scrum and calling it a day.

meanwhile the business runs on quarterly projects that have to be done by a certain marketing date, so its usually scrum + waterfall over and over

Right, the ultimate context switch is constant pinging and meetings. There’s very little reason to have engineers be in 5+ meetings a day. But at a lot of orgs, they are, and that’s an extreme context switch cost 5x a day. It’s different if it’s a purely technical meeting about the problem you’re solving right now, but they’re typically not.

And our in house "Agile Practitioners" (their job title) pushed this to a state where the next four tickets in a task get broken down to four hour long pieces of work go to four different people, regardless of their context or skill set rather than what two years ago was what one person just owned and did in a day. Work in progress is minimized by the metrics, but it doubled the overall man hours. And the Ops Director gets promoted on that WIP metric while half the team quit citing the changes due to the added communication burden and lack of ownership.

I'm thinking some people are approaching agentic development in the same manner, splitting work up across agents too aggressively, giving each agent new context/upfront plans, when the one session could have done the whole problem in the one context window.

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