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I'm seeing that a tech lead is preferring to work with 1 other engineer on a large project, and they're thinking through and presenting the architecture to others. But in prior time, this project would have been the lead + 2 seniors + 4 entry to mid level engineers to do it.

Everyone else in the team is now just aware of what's happening, and understand the architecture from the meeting to review / discuss it. But implementation and rollout is fast and just by the 2 of them.

The lead told me maintaining the quality was so much easier for the 2 of them with the right AGENTS.md lines, as he didn't have to spend time fixing guiding many people to do the right thing in PR reviews.

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But does what they present work for production or they present a demo and leave it to someone else to figure out how to make it work for real?
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This is a running production service. The team was reduced to just these 2, per the lead's instuction.

The closest I can explain this phenomenon to thos who are surpised was by the LLM variance section in this recent blog post:

https://danluu.com/ai-coding/#llm-variance

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It could be that the team was oversized and wasting time in meetings and AI has nothing to do with that.
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Welcome to majority of the teams in our industry.
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In my previous job I was working much and doing few meetings. Then USA management decided we should have 10x more meetings, because they need to know the progress hour by hour and see that green bar progress, but also somehow expected the same pace.
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Exactly what I've found. It passes the sniff test, but it's now _more work_ to get it from there to actually working.
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