Adam Smith watched ten workers make pins: split into one task each, they made hundreds of times what ten generalists could. But every new worker adds a line of coordination, and the lines grow faster than the crew. Slide the specialisation and the crew size, tap a worker to see their task — and find where the gains drown in the overhead.
Two real forces in tension. Specialisation gain: a worker doing one task speeds up (Smith's pin factory — division of labour multiplied output manyfold), so per-worker output rises with the specialisation slider. Coordination overhead: n workers have n(n−1)/2 communication channels (the shape behind Brooks's Law), and specialists need more of them — so overhead grows faster than the crew. Net output = crew × per-worker gain − overhead, all computed live; push either slider and watch the optimum crew size appear and then pass.
The specialisation-gain curve and the coordination-cost coefficient are stylised to the real SHAPES (Smith's gains, Brooks's n² channels), not fitted to a specific firm; real teams use structure, tooling, and hierarchy to blunt the n² term. The tension itself — specialisation multiplies output while coordination taxes it super-linearly — is the honest, load-bearing content.