Technical Talks

Wes McKinney

Principal Architect | Posit, PBC

The Mythical Agent-Month

Coding Agents & Autonomous Dev

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.

Principal Architect

Wes McKinney

Posit, PBC

Wes is an entrepreneur and open source developer focusing on analytical computing and new AI engineering systems. He is a Principal Architect at Posit and General Partner at Composed Ventures, an early stage angel fund. He created the Python pandas and Ibis projects, co-created Apache Arrow, and wrote Python for Data Analysis. He was a founder of Voltron Data, Ursa Labs, and DataPad. His current projects include: roborev (code review for AI agents), agentsview (search and analyze agent sessions), and msgvault (archive, search, and analyze email with AI).