No Silver Bullet Alive
No Silver Bullet
KindPaper
Published1986
StatusAlive
AuthorsFrederick Brooks
FieldSoftware engineering
Sourcedl.acm.org ↗
Brooks's argument that essential complexity admits no tenfold improvement — the field's standing rebuttal to every 'this changes everything' since.
1960198020002020
Created by Fred Brooks
Published in IEEE Computer in April 1987 (written 1986), Brooks — the IBM/360 manager who wrote The Mythical Man-Month — argued no single technology would give a 10× productivity gain in ten years, because essential complexity (the problem's own nature) dwarfs accidental complexity (the tooling's).
His four candidates — buy not build, rapid prototyping, incremental growing, great designers — remain the field's best answers. Forty years of silver bullets (OO, CASE, 4GL, low-code, AI) have each been weighed against the argument; it has held.