When cryptocurrencies first became a thing, some of their loudest proponents talked about how they were free, democratic, and open, and didn't need all of the regulation and bureaucratic institutions that "fiat currency" needed.

And then, over the course of...not that long, there was a lot of empirical discovery of why regulation and regulators exist. As someone who was sitting on the sidelines, I was able to enjoy a fair bit of schadenfreude.

Recently, I've been spending a lot of my time thinking about software engineering management. And I've been spending most of the rest of my time managing agents that are engaged in the practice of software engineering.

Right now, the new hotness in Agentic dev appears to be "swarms." Whether it's hundreds or thousands of agents collaborating on a single computer to build a browser, or a Mad Max-style dystopia with a merge queue, everything is swarms. And they kind of work? The work gets done. And the wall clock time for completion is absolutely shorter than for a strict single-agent workflow, but everything I've seen has involved a ton of ad hoc collaboration, a lot of stepping on toes, and, effectively, spilling tons and tons of tokens on the floor.

Stepping back a little bit this morning, it feels like we might be trying to wish new tools that are good, fast, and cheap into existence from first principles. It's been nearly 60 years since we recognized that Software Engineering is a discipline. The waterfall methodology predates that by about a decade. Literal generations of engineers and managers have iterated on systems and methodologies for improving software engineering reliability.

And we're out here YOLOing it.

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later - Fred Brooks, 1975

By my very uncharitable math, agentic software engineering methodologies have gotten to somewhere around the 1970s. Like everything in AI, this is, of course, a speed run. We're very quickly relearning why software engineering management and software engineering project management matter.

So by next Tuesday, maybe folks will start thinking about what they can steal from XP.