Comment by munificent
3 days ago
I don't disagree but... wouldn't you rather be working with actual people?
Spending the whole day chatting with AI agents sounds like a worst-of-both-worlds scenarios. I have to bring all of my complex, subtle soft skills into play which are difficult and tiring to use, and in the end none of that went towards actually fostering real relationships with real people.
At the end of the day, are you gonna have a beer with your agents and tell them, "Wow, we really knocked it out of the park today?"
Spending all day talking to virtual coworkers is literally the loneliest experience I can imagine, infinitely worse than actually coding in solitude the entire day.
It's a double-edged sword. AI agents don't have a long-term context window that gets better over time. People who employ AI agents today instead of juniors are going to find themselves in another local maximum: yes, the AI agent will make you more productive today compared to a junior, but (as the tech stands today) you will never be able to promote an AI agent to senior or staff, and you will not get to hire out an army of thousands of engineers that lets you deliver the sheer throughput that FAANG / Fortune 500 are capable of. You will be stuck at some shorter level of feature-delivery capacity.
Right. So many of these agentic UX stories describe it like, "I do a bunch of code reviews for my junior engineer minions."
But when I do code reviews, I don't enjoy reviewing the code itself at all. The enjoyment I get out of the process comes from feeling like I'm mentoring an engineer who will remember what I say in the code review.
If I had to spend a month doing code reviews where every single day I have to tell them the exact same corrections, knowing they will never ever learn, I would quit my job.
Being a lead over an army of enthusiastic interns with amnesia is like the worst software engineering job I can imagine.
Unless the underlying AI agent models continue to improve over time. Isn’t that the mantra of all AI CEOs, that we are simply riding the wave of technological progress.
My employer can't go out and get me three actual people to work under me for $30 a month.
EDIT: You can quibble on the exact rate of people's worth of work versus the cost of these tools, but look at what a single seat on Copilot or Cursor or Windsurf gets you, and you can see that if they are only barely more productive than you working without them, the economics are it's cheaper to "hire" virtual juniors than real juniors. And the virtual juniors are getting better by the month, go look at the Aider leaderboards and compare recent models to older ones.
That's fair but your experience at the job is also part of the compensation.
If my employer said, "Hey, you're going to keep making software, but also once a day, we have to slap you in the face." I might choose to keep the job, but they'd probably have to pay me more. They're making the work experience worse and that lowers my total compensation package.
Shepherding an army of artificial minions might be cheaper for the corporation, but it sounds like an absolutely miserable work experience so if they were offering me that job, they'd have to pay me more to take.