[jasode]

, Winamp & VLC were build by less than four people. You only needed 1000s of people because the executive vision is always to add more useless junk into each product.

Many types of software have essential complexity and minimal features that still require hundreds/thousands of software engineers. Having just 4 people is simply not enough man-hours to build the capabilities customers desire.

Complex software like 3D materials modeling and simulation, logistics software like factory and warehouse planning. Even the Linux kernel and userspace has thousands of contributors and the baseline features (drivers, sandbox, GUI, etc) that users want from a modern operating system cannot be done by a 4-person team.

All that said, there a lots of great projects with tiny teams. SQLite is 3 people. Foobar2000 is one person. ShareX screensaver I think is 1 developer in Turkey.

[misiek08]

I will use my right to disagree. Maybe not 4 people everywhere, but if you have product with well thought feature set you create those and then you really don't need 1000s people to just keep it alive and add features one by one.

I - of course - am talking about perfect approach with everyone focused to not f** it up ;)

[Lalabadie]

But big projects are where the quality of LLM contributions fall the most, and require (continuous, exhausting, thankless) supervision!

[zozbot234]

Big projects can still be highly modular, and projects built by "1000s of devs" typically are. If your desired change can be described clearly without needing too much unrelated context, the LLM will probably get it right.