Comment by munificent
6 days ago
"Kids today don’t just use agents; they use asynchronous agents. They wake up, free-associate 13 different things for their LLMs to work on, make coffee, fill out a TPS report, drive to the Mars Cheese Castle, and then check their notifications. They’ve got 13 PRs to review. Three get tossed and re-prompted. Five of them get the same feedback a junior dev gets. And five get merged."
I would jump off a bridge before I accepted that as my full-time job.
I've been programming for 20+ years and I've never wanted to move into management. I got into programming because I like programming, not because I like asking others to write code on my behalf and review what they come up with. I've been in a lead role, and I certainly do lots of code review and enjoy helping teammates grow. But the last fucking thing I want to do is delegate all the code writing to someone or something else.
I like writing code. Yes, sometimes writing code is tedious, or frustrating. Sometimes it's yak-shaving. Sometimes it's Googling. Very often, it's debugging. I'm happy to have AI help me with some of that drudgery, but if I ever get to the point that I feel like I spend my entire day in virtual meetings with AI agents, then I'm changing careers.
I get up in the morning to make things, not to watch others make things.
Maybe the kind of software engineering role I love is going to disappear, like stevedores and lamplighters. I will miss it dearly, but at least I guess I got a couple of good decades out of it. If this is what the job turns into, I'll have to find something else to do with my remaining years.
I feel this so much.
I am always amazed how so many software engineers seem to dislike coding, which seems to be a major underlying theme in the AI-coding cheerleading.
Coding never feels tedious to me. Talking to a chatbot, now that’s tedious.
God. Thank you.
> But the last fucking thing I want to do is delegate all the code writing to someone or something else
I talked about this a few days ago with coworkers and I phrased it almost exactly this way. I want to be an IC. I want to do the work. Becoming a manager-of-one to funnel all my work through would deprive me of genuinely my greatest joy in life.
I'm envious you managed a few good decades. I'm almost eight years into what has been my dream profession and to see indications it's going to morph from writing code into telling a robot to write code is just so demoralizing. I could have done this for decades. I wanted to do this for decades.
Keep it up. There'll be some rough turbulence until this transhumanist trainwreck dust settles. The human spirit shall prevail.
That snippit you quoted sounds like what some aristocratic fop that has never worked a day in their life creative writes while they are LARP'ing what they think the poor's ideal workday would sound like in an AI sales pitch meeting.
It rings about as authentic as "everybody stood up and clapped"
You say that, but I hear AI folks talk about that user experience all the time.
And at some level, it makes sense. There are a lot of extroverts out there for whom the ideal job really is feeling like an orchestra conductor delegating and coordination an army of others. There is a great feeling of empowerment in watching a group build something bigger than you could have made on your own. And, if you're not someone who really likes to get their hands dirty and do the thing yourself, why not aspire towards a style of working that always feels that high level and powerful?
And, obviously, people who are wired that way are exactly the kind of people to move into management and executive roles and end up being in charge of and evangelizing AI to the world. So it's no surprise you hear people talking about this style of working all the time.
I'm 47. I've had the opportunity to move into management many times. I've been in a lead role enough to know the positive sides of that job and I deeply enjoy the soft skills part of working with a team.
I just know who I am and know that on days where I don't feel like I really made something concrete myself, I feel like I didn't live a real day.
>if you're not someone who really likes to get their hands dirty and do the thing yourself
My life experience is that this represents modestly something north of 90% of the population. Most people are not as self motivated as HN crowd is. My cynic wants to say 99.9% Which is how I know its marketing. Its for people that fancy themselves as something they are not. IE fantasizing.
Its like all those commercials where the "boss" strolls in points to some vaguely business looking stuff and everyone runs off to work then the "boss" character goes to the beach or something. Its a fantasy sales pitch in other words. Work one minute a day and be rich.
I guess I'm getting off track which is not how AI helps workflow but that all this stuff we are seeing is marketing and there is little tangible evidence that AI helps enable the workflow you are referencing.
Same, thank you.
I have a friend and coworker who is currently struggling with this thing and similar "not making anything" issues from having worked a "maintenance/support" job consisting of little day-to-day make-creation. He took a leave for two months. I really don't think he's coming back.
It is a loss for people he works with and the things he touches. Not to mention a loss for me, because he was the one person I found at my current job with the "make stuff, be useful" attitude. Already people who see that writing on the wall are dropping out.
Sooner or later, me too, if that is in fact the way it goes. The only thing that really keeps me going is that I don't have anything else to turn to, and I do have some cloudy optimism about getting a lot of money and satisfaction in a couple years to help clean up or rework the garbage-deluge.
Your other comment about extroversion makes me think of Gifts Differing (not the best book in the universe, but some good bits especially around intro/extroversion). I just want to hit flow state and smash my head into a problem that costs me sleep and come out on top bloodied but happy and feeling like I've done something. And this is/was a really great career for that.
> This faculty of concentration is likely to characterize the introverts' careers. Whereas extraverts tend to broaden the sphere of their work, to present their products early (and often) to the world, to make themselves known to a wide circle, and to multiply relationships and activities, the introvert takes the opposite approach. Going more deeply into their work, introverts are reluctant to call it finished and publish it, and when they do, they tend to give only their conclusions, without the details of what they did. This impersonal brevity of communication narrows their audience and fame, but saves them from overwhelming external demands and allows them to return to another uninterrupted stretch of work. As Jung is reported to have said, the introverts' activity thereby gains in depth and their labor has lasting value.
Thank you so much for writing this. I started feeling like an oddball after reading most of the previous comments here.
Thank you, that's what I feel too.
For me switching the career, after spending more than 20 years in this as well... is very hard. I spent all my career outside of high-pay places like SV telling myself "I have all the time in the world, I don't need to grab most amount of money as soon as possible", so retiring is not an option.
So, switch to what? Any well-paid profession is going to be under pressure to be LLMized as much as possible.
> I got into programming because I like programming, not because I like asking others to write code on my behalf and review what they come up with
oh finally someone else who didn't enter programming because, as 7-10 year old child, they were into SOLVING PRACTICAL PROBLEMS FOR PEOPLE.
> But the last fucking thing I want to do is delegate all the code writing to someone or something else
Thank God there is at least one other person that understands that the ratio between creative and reactive work is crucial for wellbeing at the job.
For crying out loud.
> but if I ever get to the point that I feel like I spend my entire day in virtual meetings with AI agents, then I'm changing careers
so am I.
> but at least I guess I got a couple of good decades out of it
Thanks for this perspective. Yes, at least we've got our memories, and the code locations and commits we recall from memory, from a distance of 10 or more years.
>. If this is what the job turns into, I'll have to find something else to do with my remaining years
Me too.
> as 7-10 year old child, they were into SOLVING PRACTICAL PROBLEMS FOR PEOPLE.
Some of my fondest childhood memories are sitting in my school's resource center in front of a TRS-80, laboriously typing in some mimeographed BASIC code while wondering, "Is this the most efficient way I can increase shareholder value for the corporation?"
I'm with you two. I can work on boring problems in boring domains and enjoy the design and implementation aspect because it's inherently creative. Take away those and now my only job is the guy in Office Space who takes the requirements from the customers to the developers, if I'm lucky enough to have one at that point.
I don't want to have to change careers, as this is one that I've been working towards to some degree since I was a child. Including some intense work in college and some brutal first couple jobs where I worked hard to pick up marketable skills. Obviously the market doesn't care what I want, but I find the author of this piece to be a bit too flippant in his "but they take-rr jerbs" section. Working hard to get a well paying job only to have to start (likely near the bottom) in another career for much less pay is not something to treat lightly.
Tell me when this bus leaves because I’ll get on it with you.
> I get up in the morning to make things, not to watch others make things.
If you ever followed down the rabbit hole of children content on YouTube, the one that infants and toddlers end up after an hour of autoplay with some innocent cartoon at the beginning, you'd find among the piles of morbid psychotic trash a variety of videos of children watching someone else playing some games, a whole class of videos in itself.
I can't explain this with anything else but a coordinated effort to flash the norm of watching someone/something doing something as opposed to being engaged in immediate action yourself into the firmware of future people. This lines up with many other current trends pretty well. Talk about incrementing Baudrillard's level of simulation a notch up.