The Mythical Token-Month: Essays on Building Software with Machines That Write

The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks makes one simple claim: adding people to a late project makes it later. A man-month measures cost, not necessarily progress. Now one of the people on the team is an agent. The Mythical Token-Month asks what happens to Brooks's central propositions once part of the workforce doesn't sleep, doesn't forget, and bills by the token. Vendor dashboards report tokens generated, suggestions accepted, lines committed and many other so called productivity metrics of the moment. This book argues that such numbers correlate with characters that compile. They tell nothing about whether the resulting system is understood, maintainable, >Working almost chapter by chapter through Brooks's original arguments - the tar pit, the surgical team, the second-system effect, no silver bullet - the book asks which insights still hold, which needs an update, and which the new tools >Written for practicing engineers, architects, and technical leads, this is a book about the durable problem underneath the churn: what estimation, architecture, and trust require when part of your system routinely disagrees with itself between two runs of the same prompt. Dr. Francesco Gadaleta is a computer engineer and entrepreneur who has been working in the field of AI for two decades. He holds degrees from Politecnico di Milano and KU Leuven, is the founder of Amethix Technologies, and hosts the Data Science at Home podcast. He has spent the last two decades building machine learning systems across healthcare, manufacturing, and connected devices, the source of this book's case material.