Has AI Finally Made Fred Brooks' Surgical Team a Reality?
What if one developer could outperform a team—not by working harder, but by working with AI as their surgical support crew?
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Thank you for reading Great CTO. I publish weekly and have an archive of over 150 posts, each packed with valuable insights on various topics relevant to the CTO and the issues they face, distilled from my career experience.
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If you’d like to support the growth of this resource, consider upgrading to paid and take advantage of the other ways I can help you.This is an AI-assisted post based on brainstorming I did with one of my chatbots. It is more intended as a thought starter than an academic exploration and re-examination of Brooks’ work. Nonetheless, I feel it raises some interesting considerations around why the productivity of AI-assisted development is more than just faster typing.
Has AI Finally Made Fred Brooks' Surgical Team a Reality?
Fred Brooks had a provocative idea.
Instead of growing software teams by adding more generalist developers, he suggested something radical: what if one elite developer—the “surgeon”—was surrounded by a carefully structured team of skilled specialists, each removing obstacles and supporting them to focus entirely on writing the critical code?
This was the Surgical Team model from The Mythical Man-Month. It was elegant, focused, and theoretically high-performance.
And for decades, it remained exactly that: theoretical.
Until now.
🧠 The Original Vision: A Developer with a Pit Crew
Brooks imagined a team where the lead developer was the high-leverage operator, and everyone else existed to remove drag.
The surgeon writes all the critical code.
The co-pilot shadows and can step in if needed.
The editor polishes documentation and code comments.
The toolsmith builds internal tools to increase speed.
The tester ensures quality and catches regressions.
The secretary keeps the machine running: meetings, reports, comms.
The idea? Reduce coordination overhead. Increase clarity. Let the best developer fly.
But in reality, few companies ever built teams this way. Why?
❌ Why It Didn’t Work—Until Now
Two reasons:
Too expensive. Assigning a team of six to support one person just didn’t make business sense.
Too human. Even if you could afford it, humans bring context-switching, fatigue, misalignment, and communication drag.
The model was brilliant on paper. It just didn’t scale with people.
🤖 The AI-Assisted Comeback
Fast forward to 2025, and the story is different.
AI tools have started quietly slotting into the exact roles Brooks imagined.
AI as Co-pilot – Code suggestions, error catching, pattern recognition, pair programming.
AI as Editor – Cleaner documentation, code formatting, and commit message writing.
AI as Toolsmith – Need a script? A CLI? A Slack bot? Done.
AI as Tester – Auto-generated test suites, edge-case identification, regression checks.
AI as Secretary – Summarised meetings, cleaned-up notes, ticket or project artifact generation.
What was once an elite human team can now be largely automated or augmented by intelligent agents working 24/7.
Suddenly, the “surgeon” isn’t just surrounded—they’re amplified.
💡 Rethinking the Role of the Modern Surgeon
The developer’s role hasn’t shrunk—but it has evolved.
The best devs are no longer buried in logistics, communication overhead, or repetitive tasks. Instead, they become:
System designers
Prompt architects
Decision-makers with AI support
The new surgeon isn’t surrounded by people.
They’re surrounded by AI.
It’s not just faster. It’s clearer. It’s quieter. It’s focused.
🔁 What This Means for Tech Leaders
If you lead teams, this raises important questions:
Do you still need five-person teams for every feature set?
What happens when one AI-augmented developer is more productive than three traditional ones?
Could you experiment with micro-teams where one senior dev is supported by fractional roles and intelligent automation?
This isn’t about replacing humans. It’s about designing around a new leverage model.
If you had one exceptional developer and a blank slate—would you structure their team the same way you do now?
🩺 The Surgical Model, Reimagined
Fred Brooks was ahead of his time.
He didn’t just anticipate the pain of coordination. He foresaw the power of focus. What he lacked was the infrastructure to make it viable.
Now we have it.
With AI in the support roles, the Surgical Team might be less of a metaphor—and more of a blueprint.
💬 I’d Love Your Take
Q1: What would you need in place to safely experiment with an AI-supported solo dev sprint?
Q2: If AI could reliably support your top devs, how would that change who you hire next?
👀 Coming Soon…
Next week, I’ll continue on my theme of AI-assisted development, covering all angles important for technology leaders to make informed decisions on how to leverage this fast-evolving technology and what it means for other decisions, such as hiring and budgeting.
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And if this idea sparked something—share it. Or better yet, hit reply and tell me how you’re thinking about team design in the age of AI.
—Daniel
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