Comment by leokennis
10 hours ago
> The obvious objection is that code produced at that speed becomes unmanageable, a liability in itself. That is a reasonable concern, but it largely applies when agents produce code that humans then maintain. Agentic platforms are being iterated upon quickly, and for established patterns and non-business-critical code, which is the majority of what most engineering organizations actually maintain, detailed human familiarity with the codebase matters less than it once did. A messy codebase is still cheaper to send ten agents through than to staff a team around. And even if the agents need ten days to reason through an unfamiliar system, that is still faster and cheaper than most development teams operating today. The liability argument holds in a human-to-human or agent-to-human world. In an agent-to-agent world, it largely dissolves.
Then I'd wager it's the same for the courses and workshop this guy is selling...an LLM can probably give me at least 75% of the financial insights for not even .1% of what this "agile coach" is asking for his workshops and courses.
Maybe the "agile coach LLM" can explain to the "coding LLM's" why they're too expensive, and then the "coding LLM's" can tell the "agile coach LLM" to take the next standby shift then, if he knows so much about code?
And then we actual humans can have a day off and relax at the pool.
Ceding the premise that the AGI is gonna eat my job, my job involves reading the spec to be able verify the code and output so the there’s a human to fire and sue. There are five layers of fluffy management and corporate BS before we get to that part, and the AGI is more competent at those fungible skills.
With the annoying process people out of the picture, even reviewing vibeslop full time sounds kinda nice… Feet up, warm coffee, just me and my agents so I can swear whenever I need to. No meetings, no problems.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitzredakteur
Amazing bit of history, thank you!
There’s gonna be one guy in charge of you, and he’s going to expect you to be putting out 20x output while thanking him for the privilege of being employed, assuming all goes the way every management team seems to want
I dont think this will happen because AI has become a straight up cult and things that are going well don’t need so many people performatively telling each other how well things are going.
If a SWE could truly output 20x their effort, that person would probably be better at freelancing or teaming up with another SWE. If something can be automated away to AI is Project Management. Also, there has to be a point where delivering more and faster code doesn’t matter, because the choke points are somewhere else in the Project Life Cycle, say waiting for legal, other vendors, budgets, suppliers, etc, so productivity could max out at say 3X, after which, unless you have a strong pipeline of work, your engineers will be sitting around waiting for the next phase of the project to start.
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But that's really not the point of this particular article.
The point being made is, do you know what financial impact your work is having in terms of increasing revenues or decreasing costs?
If the company revenue is going down and costs increasing, developers will be laid off regardless of how many tickets they close.
> There’s gonna be one guy in charge of you, and he’s going to expect you to be putting out 20x output while thanking him for the privilege of being employed, assuming all goes the way every management team seems to want
A perfect summation.
To add to this, I remember somebody here on HN pointing out a few months ago that they’ve never seen so much investment in businesses that are going “we don’t actually know what the billion dollar application is so we’re going to sell y’all some rough tools and bank on the rest of you figuring it out for us.”
I got 99 problems but an agent ain’t one.
I think you missed the key capitalist part:
There needs to be someone to benefit from all your labor. No, no, it can't be you. You have conflicts of interest!
What if your work isn't benefitting anyone?
> my job involves reading the spec to be able verify the code and output so the there’s a human to fire and sue.
So, you're the programmer (verify code) and the QA (verify output) and the project manager (read the spec)?
That's the difference between programming and software engineering.
A software engineer should be able to talk directly to customers to capture requirements, turn that into spec sheet, create an estimate and a bunch of work items, write the whole system (or involve other developers/engineers/programmers to woek on their work items), and finally be able to verify and test the whole system.
That entire role is software engineering. Many in the industry suck at most of the parts and only like the programming part.
I think the hardest part is requirements gathering (e.g. creating organized and detailed notes) and offloading work planned work to other developers in a neat way, generally speaking, based on what I see. In other words, human friction areas.
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qa has long ago merged with programming in "unified engineering". Also with SRE ("devops") and now the trend is to merge with CSE and product management too ("product mindset", forward-deployed engineers). So yeah, pretty much, that's the trend. What would you trust more - an engineer doing project management too - or a project manager doing the engineering job?
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I mean, yes?
Maybe it's different where you live but QA pretty much disappeared a few years ago and project managers never had anything to do with the actual software
Exactly. I think it's been a while since I've read an LLM hot take which couldnt have been written by an LLM and this one is no exception.
There's a 99% chance that the training materials on sale are equally replaceable with a prompt.
True. And yet, as an organization when you buy OP's training, you don't buy the material. You buy the feeling that you make your organization becomes more productive. You buy the signal to your boss that you are innovative and working to make your organization more productive. And you buy the time and headspace from your engineers that they are thinking if at least for 2 hours about making the organization more productive. The latter can be well worth the cost, and the former surely too.
They're buying a defensible (or laudable) justification when the training company's fee appears as a line item in the company budget.
This doesnt mean the training has to be good, useful or original in the slightest but the provider does need to have credentials which arent just "some dev with a hot take" that a fellow executive would recognize.
In general, there’s very little info that costs much to learn nowadays. The human standing in the front is a disciplinarian to force you to learn it.
Or, more likely, a snake oil seller dedicating more to marketing than to the product.