Tell HN: Coherence Doesn't Scale

1 point

3 months ago

Since quitting my software engineering job in November because my boss was pushing reckless use of AI, I've spent a ton of time trying to figure out what place AI actually has in the future economy.

Thanks in large part to some amazing Substack authors[0,1] as well as the fact that agentic engineering is in the process of rediscovering everything that we have learned about human delegation, I finally had a breakthrough: coherence doesn't scale.

A ton of energy has been & will be expended trying to overcome this simple, yet possibly universal law.

This law also guarantees that there will always be work scaling things that are coherent & cohering things that have scaled (or more likely breaking it into a federal/hierarchy system of smaller, more coherent sub-units).

0: https://thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/p/the-rule-that-never-was-what-7-38

1: https://abiawomosu.substack.com