Comment by apsurd
7 days ago
The "manage a fleet of massively parallelized agents" gets me uneasy too. It sounds uber powerful on its face. And where all the nerd interest lies.
It sounds stressful, like the ultimate manager job. Not what I signed up for.
But I also still hold onto this idea that shipping tons of iterations of "stuff" was never really the problem. Early in my dev experience I wanted to code everything all day every day. And I did and that's how I learned. And now in my second decade I switched to "why code anything?". In a business sense I mean, coding the thing is almost never the missing piece.
I joke in meetings that the answer is always "yes" whenever cross-functional teams ask "can we do this?". "How hard would x be?". For tech teams the answer _is_ always YES! I get that out of the way because that's never the right question to ask.
Absolutely this. LLM assistance means we can work faster, and that we can build things that previously weren't feasible given the available time and resources.
Which makes the hardest problem in software even harder: what should we build? It doesn't matter how fast you can move if you're consistently solving the wrong problems.
> Which makes the hardest problem in software even harder: what should we build?
You should build what’s personally fun and challenging to you and/or what is useful and solves a problem. Building for any other reason, including and especially the unfettered pursuit of profit, is what turns everything to shit.
Well, there goes all our jobs.
I agree with you, but unfortunately, big boy gotta eat, and that means we have to sit around writing shitty commercial software. I already hate that, I would prefer if it didn't get worse.
Absolutely!
I've noticed that almost immediately after people discovered GPT could write code, this happened -- startups I worked with started rapidly expanding the scope of what they wanted to make. Suddenly all MVP's had to be multi-tenant with complex authorization, impersonation, microservices, monitoring, all the stuff that we used to build after we got users has now been pulled right to the starting gate of development -- because AI makes it easy to build all that stuff quickly. But it doesn't tell us if we should.
Exactly, I think one of the reasons programers are becoming so depressed over these AI agents is that they’re finally realizing that it was never really about the code, but about the outcome - and btw, this cold hard fact applies to the pre-LLM era.
This occurred to me years ago when I was talking to a friend’s wife, who is a very intelligent and accomplished attorney. She was legitimately surprised when I explained that they were multiple programming languages, and technology stacks behind the software that she uses on a daily basis.
Even my wife, a teacher who is very tech savvy (she’s the one who insisted I try ChatGPT after brushing it off) reminds me on the regular that she doesn’t care about how any of it works just that it doesn’t “glitch” when she’s in the middle of a class. Which has always been good for me to remember when I get off into the weeds yak shaving.
I do think code-as-craft should be respected in its own right. I'm very much a craftsman coder. It makes sense how I could clock so many hours over all these years.
But what I do "at work" isn't the same as my personal pursuit and embracing that different framing positively has made me more at peace and also better at the work job.
"AI has made coding the easy part. The hard part now is product management", said Andrew Ng.
> The "manage a fleet of massively parallelized agents" gets me uneasy too
It shouldn't. The agents are not good enough to be used in a fleet.
I have Claude. It's fine, but I'm pretty confident that my low usage of Claude would out-compete a fleet of agents, because it feels like there's an inverse correlation between the number of tokens you spend and the quality of the resulting code (more tokens = more code to review, more bad code slips through)
That's basically my finding as well. Agent wrangling is herding cats. Working normally but tapping Claude for the smallest possible thing (look this up, finish this psuedocode, grab an example of this) feels like it works better all around—faster, safer, far fewer tokens, results in work that the team understands, aides flow rather than adding constant context switching...
Maybe I'm wrong and the time will come to hang up my editor and go open an Italian restaurant or something. Until then I'm really inclined to believe my own eyes.
Yes. The first programmers used computers as a necessity to get things done. Difficult mathematical calculations, a fancy control system.
This is where we should be. Using computers to solve problems. Not just "doing programming".
Raise your head, look towards the horizon.
Yes, and forget about ownership of anything too. Only rental, only hardcore, because life is but an experience, spread your wings and fly, weeee, towards our hyperprofits and your prozac dreams!
AI threads on HN reek of venture capital agendas so bad it's unbearable.
I think rather your post summarizes AI threads on HN.
Capitalism is what it is, and has been so for the last 200 years. The alternatives have always proven worse.
In my (small) country we have had many crises like this. Textile industry, shipbuilding. But we have survived by not looking back but looking into the future. And given people the right conditions for retraining.
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