Comment by matrix87

Imo this will be the future model: a company puts a gun to your head, gives you agents, and tells you to figure out how to maximize the utility output you provide as an employee. They might put a token limit which incentivizes efficient token usage.

There's a lot of "room" here for creativity, i.e. the agents don't know how to milk the agents efficiently, which is essentially your new job. The agents might not know how to structure tasks so that the agents run overnight and run the proper experiment.

The difference between mediocre and 10x will increase. The more aggressive SV performance culture is probably going to become more mainstream.

Frankly, I think this whole model is way more burnout inducing. You're not really doing software engineering anymore. You're running this mental loop in the background of trying to multiplex between agents and mapping unstructured business problems to agentic work.

It's probably going to infect other industries over time. Software is the first big wave. I don't think people with computer skills who are good at computers will be screwed out of work long term. The tech industry has a lot of concentrated technical capital in the form of tooling and automation that other parts of the economy could significantly benefit from. Short term it looks bad, but long term, computers will become more and more dominant over the economy.

I don't think companies have yet figured out how to adapt their hiring, managerial practices, or internal incentive structures to reflect this. Most of what they're doing now is extremely crude and terrible for morale.