The Coming Coordination Calamity
The article discusses the increasing coordination challenges faced by engineers as they manage both human and coding agents. With companies like Cloudflare and Meta reducing managerial roles, the span of control for existing managers is expanding, leading to more coordination work. This shift is expected to complicate the day-to-day tasks of software engineering significantly.
- ▪Companies are reducing the number of managers while increasing the span of control for existing ones.
- ▪Coordination costs rise with the number of agents involved, making larger organizations slower.
- ▪Engineers will spend more time coordinating multiple coding agents in addition to their usual tasks.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The coming coordination calamity Lorin Hochstein cognitive-systems-engineering May 24, 2026May 25, 2026 3 Minutes We cut middle managers across the organization because AI allows us to have more direct reports per manager while still measuring and mentoring our teams effectively. – Matthew Prince, How I Choose Which Cloudflare Employees to Replace With AI My PhD research involved studying programmer productivity for a very specific domain: high-performance computing, more commonly known as supercomputers. It turns out that supercomputers are difficult to program, and so the U.S. government was interested in assessing the productivity impact of different software engineering technologies (in my case, parallel programming languages), which is how the research got funded.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Surfing Complexity.