Comment by rootnod3
16 hours ago
And then Anthropic has an outage and you what...have a coffee break until then? All that time babysitting the AIs just to be a little faster but probably with less knowledge/control over what they did?
16 hours ago
And then Anthropic has an outage and you what...have a coffee break until then? All that time babysitting the AIs just to be a little faster but probably with less knowledge/control over what they did?
I don’t think you’re quite getting what OP is describing. I work in a similar way… I am aware of all the code being written. If Claude had an outage I could write it myself. It would just take longer.
You say “all that time” babysitting AIs but in my experience it isn’t that much time, if anything the back and forth at the planning stages is more productive than when I’m doing it by myself because I’m being asked questions and having to think things through from different angles.
> I am aware of all the code being written.
Define 'aware'. The volume of code for a feature/system to make it worth using a more complex workflow such as this one, is definitely larger than what a human can even briefly review and build a mental model about the inner workings within a reasonable amount of time. Reasonable meaning not considerable delaying the process. When deadlines loom and management adds pressure, this 'awareness' is the first thing that goes out the window.
How do you stay aware of all code being written?
Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve never understood how one understands from reading code. Yes you can understand what that code does, but not why it was done that way instead of a different way. In the end I only understand it deeply if I end up writing it. Chatting through it is helpful to me, but having AI crank out code loses all of that context pretty quickly.
I’m not disagreeing. Just curious how you think about this, and if there are key parts of your process that help you stay contexted in.
If you can't understand why the code is done in a certain way from reading it then the code is missing comments or needs to be refactored.
Even code you write yourself, given enough time, you will forget the why unless you wrote comments. In a way comments are as much for you as they are for others.
Even before AI, understanding code you didn't write is essential to working on a team of other developers. If you can't understand the code from reading it, then that's part of the feedback loop - too complex, needs comments, etc..
On large teams you'll spend as much time reading code as you do writing it. And long term when it comes to writing maintainable code - the ability for others to read and understand it, including the why of it, is paramount. Your code could literally be around for decades.
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I think it's just like reading a book. Will you get more context & understanding if you write the book? You most probably will. But that doesn't mean that you don't get anything just by reading it.
And if you already know the material explained by the book, yes i don't need to write it to understand it.
People get into being amazing at code by being interested in what it does rather than what it is. It's a whole area that I can see but can't get to, where it's all about DRY and elegance and what's being done is relatively unimportant because it's web stuff or whatever, just widgets and sadness.
As a result there's a whole universe of code where the how of it, the elegance, is the main thing, and what it's doing is putting characters on the screen a bit slower than the next thing but there are some amazing concepts that are supposed to make it all an axiomatic synthesis of how to think about code forever, replacing all precious concepts of thinking about code.
Now AI can think about code forever while doing nothing.
If you only have one AI window open, you’re doing it wrong. You task swap to another window/agent, get it working on something, rinse and repeat. I can keep 4 busy most of the time. When I task swap I also check in on what the other agents are doing to make sure they’re on track, not blocked and not struggling.
So exactly like playing Civ or some other building game. You constantly jump around between your various units and correct what they are doing.
I do wonder how much of how people approach coding is shaped by the games they played when younger.
congratulations on your soon to be coming burnout.
Keeping that many tasks in parallel, running all the time will kill you.
If you have ever TL'd a team, it doesn't sound too crazy. I have 8 folks I generally talk to very consistently throughout the day. If I'm not in 1:1s with them I'm usually reviewing their changes or chatting with them over chat. I don't think I can do all of that and work with a bunch of AI windows, but I do think they could likely do something similar to me with several agents running in parallel.
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I suppose it depends how hands-off the tasks are - I max out at 2 parallel sessions working on different parts and it's fairly exhausting once done. I can see the number of parallel work increasing if there's a good dev/test loop. But at $WORK, that's not usually an option.
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It's great to work from home so you can take nice little micro naps while code's generating, reviewing, building, and deploying.
A calm attentive alternative of vibe coding: restful coding.
It's much easier to read and review code after a refreshing cat nap, especially with a real cat.
Too bad that's not usually acceptable to do that in the office. It should be! Slacking off by sword fighting all day is too exhausting.
https://xkcd.com/303/
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> congratulations on your soon to be coming burnout.
Multitasking does not mean burnout. It just means you are not wasting time while idling. Multitasking was not invented for AI coding assistants. What do you think feature branches are used for?
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As the AI is working, I am working - reviewing, regression testing, thinking about if the currently implementation is too complex and how to simplify it etc.. I totally review and understand everything the AI is generating and often push back, have it re-do something, or do it myself. In the end I feel like the quality of the work is at a v3 level in the time it took to do a v1. The productivity and quality increase is real.
Yes get a coffee. Being able to execute 5 things at once is amazing, but it's a recipe for burnout. We have to be more careful and explicit about how we spend our time, and that means more explicit time away. If this thing makes you 10x more effective (I truly believe it can), you can afford to spend 20% less time behind the desk and more time doing whatever it is that actually makes you happy. Hopefully your manager understands that calculus.
> Hopefully your manager understands that calculus.
The majority of jobs are still paid on a 40 hour per week basis. Disappearing for a day each week (20%) won't fly when you're full time.
It’s a fragile equilibrium and it depends on the kind of project you’re working on. If the knowledge debt is ok then yes, it’s just like a delivery job, if the truck has an engine problem I won’t continue to deliver the packages by walking or finding and setting up an other truck from where the vehicle breakdown happens. I’ll just wait because the wait is still faster than the other solution because of the knowledge debt it’s too long to pickup by hand and continue.
Now if it’s my job then I can’t have a knowledge debt and if Claude is down I’ll continue working manually because I know and understand and can continue without having to understand a lot of logic before continuing
I’ll deal with that problem when it happens
Whenever Anthropic is down, I switch to my other alternative AI provider. If that is also unavailable, or no more tokens left, then I can switch to my local AI. Not the same in terms of quality and speed, but good enough for an experienced engineer to still be more productive than falling back to doing it by hand. For my principal activity I do not want to be dependent on a sole provider. Besides that, I expect that the pending token price increases are going to hurt a lot of people/companies.
We're already having coffee breaks when AWS and CloudFlare are down. What's another break in the mix? If anything, we might be lucky that they're down at the same time, so we can consolidate the breaks.
What do you do when your search engine goes down?
I have all the relevant sites for my projects in my browser history. A search engine is just a quicker way to get to a particular page.
And then solar radiation permanently knocks out the electrical grid and you what... have coffee break until society finds a new equilibrium?
No, then you go back to programming on the white board, just like in college. /j
You can have multiple tasks running
why not?
then demand some lack-of-uptime compensation for a lack of uptime
"All that time babysitting the AIs just to be a little faster" doesn't seem like an accurate/unbiased portrayal of what they said: "The v1 feature feels more like a v3 given the amount of iteration it already went through."
Codex has 99.98% uptime
Unlike Claude who barely has 2 9s.
In Soviet Russia, the AI babysits you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Soviet_Russia
Company I'm familiar with that went all in on Codex ran out of tokens for a week and wouldn't increase their spend.
I pretty significant number of their engineers flat out refused to work. Like publicly said so. "Increase our plan or I'm taking the week off."
so how did this go?
management flinched first.