There's no such thing as a small software team anymore
The article argues that the rise of AI coding agents is making software modularity essential, pushing companies toward microservice architectures. By breaking codebases into smaller, agent-friendly modules, teams can scale development and parallelize tasks more effectively.
Why it matters
This shift suggests a fundamental change in software engineering practices, where the limitations of AI context windows dictate the structural design of enterprise software.
Uber infamously runs thousands of microservices . They ended up with so many services because hundreds of engineers wanted to deploy on their own schedule, with clear ownership of their code, instead of waiting in one giant merge queue.
For decades a small team with 5 or 10 people writing code at the same time didn't even need to consider doing this. On a busy day a small team might generate 50 commits/20 pushes/10 PRs. A small team today, running 20-100 agents in parallel, might generate 500 commits/200 pushes/100 PRs.
So Uber's approach to modularity may have seemed extreme at the time, but it could become the new normal.
One developer coding in a "single-threaded" way, editing one file at a time:
One developer coding in a "multi-threaded" way, using coding agents in parallel:
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