Comment by lapcat
5 days ago
If my future career consists of constantly prompting and code-reviewing a semi-competent, nonhuman coder in order to eventually produce something decent, then I want no part in that future, even if it's more "efficient" in the sense of taking less time overall. That sounds extremely frustrating, personally unrewarding, alienating. I've read the prompts and the commit messages, and to be honest, I don't have the patience to deal with a Claude-level coder. I'd be yelling at the idiot and shaking my fists the whole time. I'd rather just take more time and write the code myself. It's much more pleasant that way. This future of A.I. work sounds like a dystopia to me. I didn't sign up for that. I never wanted to be a glorified babysitter.
It feels infinitely worse than mentoring an inexperienced engineer, because Claude is inhuman. There's no personal relationship, it doesn't make human mistakes or achieve human successes, and if Claude happens to get better in the future, that's not because you personally taught it anything. And you certainly can't become friends.
They want to turn artists and craftsmen into assembly line supervisors.
> They want to turn artists and craftsmen into assembly line supervisors.
the same was uttered by blacksmiths and other craftsman who has been displaced by technology. Yet they are mercilessly crushed.
Your enjoyment of a job is not a consideration to those paying you to do it; and if there's a more efficient way, it will be adopted. The idea that your job is your identity may be at fault here - and when someone's identity is being threatened (as it very much is right now with these new AI tools), they respond very negatively.
> the same was uttered by blacksmiths and other craftsman who has been displaced by technology. Yet they are mercilessly crushed.
This is misleading. The job of blacksmith wasn't automated away. There's just no demand for their services anymore, because we no longer have knights wearing armor, brandishing swords, and riding horses. In contrast, computer software is not disappearing; if anything, it's becoming ubiquitous.
> Your enjoyment of a job is not a consideration to those paying you to do it
But it is a consideration to me in offering my services. And everyone admits that even with LLMs and agents, experienced senior developers are crucial to keep the whole process from falling into utter crap and failure. Claude can't supervise itself.
> The idea that your job is your identity may be at fault here
No, it's just about not wanting to spend a large portion of my waking hours doing something I hate.
> This is misleading. The job of blacksmith wasn't automated away. There's just no demand for their services anymore, because we no longer have knights wearing armor, brandishing swords, and riding horses. In contrast, computer software is not disappearing; if anything, it's becoming ubiquitous.
Why didn't blacksmiths produce rail tracks, if not because they were replaced by more efficient processes? One could say iron and steel became as ubiquitous during the Industrial Revolution as computer software is becoming today...
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I deeply resent the notion that we engineers should let non-engineers tell us how to achieve agreed-upon objectives (e.g. "use LLMs more!"). I'm happy to use LLMs when they are useful. If I have to babysit them excessively, then it's a double loss: I'm not accruing domain knowledge, and I'm wasting time. The contract of work I was sold in the early 2000s: decision makers specify what should be be built, and what the time constraints are. This bounds the space of possibilities along with the local engineering culture. I bear the responsibility of execution, clarifying requirements, and bringing up potential issues sooner rather than later.
However, at no point was the exact technical approach prescribed to me. It'd be asinine if someone came to me and said, "you need to be using VSCode, not vim." It's irrelevant to execution. Yet, that's exactly what's happening with LLMs.
The denial of agency to devs via prescriptive LLM edicts will only end badly.
> I deeply resent the notion that we engineers should let non-engineers tell us how to achieve agreed-upon objectives
This is not how it works. The technology will prevail or not based on whether people using it are noticeably more efficient using it, not the whims of your CEO - nor yours!
You then make an argument as to why you think the net gain will not be positive, which is fine, but that crucial question is what everything hinges on.