Division of labour

I recently began reading Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. His writing style is incompatible with the 2020s world we live in, so you need to pause and process each long sentence he composes. Once you get over that hurdle, you realize that the man did codify some wonderful ideas. One of the first concepts he introduces is that of division of labour. Specifically, Adam Smith argues the following.

Consider the process of producing a good or service. The starting option would be to pick a human and tell them to own the production of that good or service end-to-end. Let's say that the production of that one human is 1 unit per day. If you wanted to produce 10 units, you would employ 10 humans. For 100 units, you would employ 100 humans. I.e., there is a linear relationship between production and the number of humans IF AND ONLY IF each human produces that good or service end-to-end. Consider, however, that the production process consists of discrete steps (say, 10). These steps could be in some serial and parallel combination, but that is less relevant. If we now take the same 10 humans and assign 1 human per step, it turns out that the output of these 10 humans will be far greater than 10 units—maybe 50 units or even 500 units. Why?

• Specialization: As a human does a task, they get better at it. If a human is doing all 10 steps, they will improve at all 10 of them. However, if a human is doing only 1 step, all of their "improvement" is directed towards that step alone. Incidentally, as we break down and specialize the process of producing a good or service, it births new occupations. Multiple examples of this: master forgers, carpenters, chefs, accountants, and front-end engineers.
• Automation: It is easier to find automation and improvement opportunities when looking at just one discrete step.
• Less changeovers: Since each human is only doing one step, they don't need to change the tools they use or context switch as often.

SO WHAT?

In the passage above, replace the phrase "good or service" with "knowledge work or software development," and the word "human" with "agent."