The author revisits Fred Brooks’s classic software lessons in the era of AI coding agents, arguing that while agents wipe out accidental complexity, they amplify essential design challenges and generate unprecedented technical debt. He warns of new “agentic” tar pits, scope creep, and coordination overhead as AI swarms bloat codebases and shift the real work back to human judgment and taste.

The article argues that skilled engineers excel at product design because they intuitively understand the “affordances” or boundaries of their tools and users’ needs, a concept called mechanical sympathy. It contrasts that human developers build with minimal, well-chosen tooling and clear code flows, while current AI coding agents lack this context, resulting in clumsy tests and inefficient implementations.