The Convergence Tax

The Mythical Man-Month was never really about people-hours. Its lesson was coordination: every person you add multiplies the channels you have to keep aligned. The bottleneck was always getting humans to converge on the right call.

That tax hasn't gone away — it's gotten worse, relatively. The cost of aligning a person on a decision is roughly flat, maybe rising as the context they need grows. The cost of aligning a model keeps falling. You spec the intent once and it converges in seconds: no ego, no calendar, no re-litigating last week.

So the friction is migrating. Execution used to be the hard part and consensus the quiet assumption. Now consensus is the hard part and execution is nearly free.

Which flips the scarce skill. It's no longer producing the work. It's deciding what's right — fast enough that the humans aren't the thing everyone's waiting on.