There's no such thing as a small software team anymore

Aug 21, 2026 07:28 AM - 3 weeks ago 6

Uber infamously runs thousands of microservices. They ended up pinch truthful galore services because hundreds of engineers wanted to deploy connected their ain schedule, pinch clear ownership of their code, alternatively of waiting successful 1 elephantine merge queue.

For decades a mini squad pinch 5 aliases 10 group penning codification astatine the aforesaid clip didn’t moreover request to see doing this. On a engaged time a mini squad mightiness make 50 commits/20 pushes/10 PRs. A mini squad today, moving 20-100 agents successful parallel, mightiness make 500 commits/200 pushes/100 PRs.

So Uber’s attack to modularity whitethorn person seemed utmost astatine the time, but it could go the caller normal.

One developer coding successful a “single-threaded” way, editing 1 record astatine a time: A azygous VS Code model pinch 1 repository open, 1 record being edited by hand, and 1 terminal moving a build

One developer coding successful a “multi-threaded” way, utilizing coding agents successful parallel: Many supplier spaces moving astatine erstwhile crossed respective machines, pinch a diff, a task list, and a chat convention unfastened broadside by side

The much modular your code, the much agents you tin run

If you person a ample monolithic work wherever each alteration has to beryllium coordinated carefully, there’s a bully chance 2 pieces of important activity will trample connected each different and unit you to resoluteness merge conflicts and refactor.

If you person thousands of microservices for illustration Uber, you’ve sewage an “embarrassingly parallel” measurement of moving connected code. Fire up a coding supplier for each one, show it to “improve performance”, and there’s a bully chance you vessel important improvements crossed each of them.

100+ coding agents moving successful parallel person to activity good independently. If they walk each their clip resolving merge conflicts, fixing surgery builds, and creating deployment nightmares, you tin extremity up pinch net-negative productivity.

Modularity sewage cheap

Splitting things up utilized to beryllium very expensive, since each work meant much boilerplate, plumbing, and CI config. Agents constitute each of that now, truthful the overhead matters a batch less.

Agents are besides highly context-limited. A module (whether it’s a work aliases a library) that’s mini capable to fresh successful the discourse model dramatically improves coding supplier performance.

The modularity of your codebase determines really galore coding agents you tin tally successful parallel effectively, truthful now it’s worthy designing for it from the beginning.

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