Comment by lazide
14 hours ago
Being engaged == doing stuff, not necessarily being actually productive.
Busy does not always equal doing something useful.
Easy to pay a lot to the model vendor though eh?
14 hours ago
Being engaged == doing stuff, not necessarily being actually productive.
Busy does not always equal doing something useful.
Easy to pay a lot to the model vendor though eh?
> Being engaged == doing stuff, not necessarily being actually productive.
Sure. So to clarify, no, I did not just spend it on busy procrastination, and I don't think it promotes that either. Would contradict my story anyhow, this was not some trick I was trying to play on you.
> Easy to pay a lot to the model vendor though eh?
Certainly, as I'm not the one paying. Though it's exactly corporate who really wants to have it both ways (who wouldn't?), and keeps trying to get me to use the crappy useless models because they are cheaper, despite them tanking productivity rather than helping it, so go figure.
There will definitely be a time when the hype dries up, and mgmt will start playing hardball. I'm confident that the value is there, and that I'll be able to demonstrate it to them that it is more than worth it. You can choose to not believe that, up to you. Maybe it really isn't true for your line of work, after all.
I’m not saying it’s bad. I will note, however, that if it is actually accomplishing something net useful usually requires a long attention span and skepticism, which as you note the tools actively train everyone away from.
I did not claim they train people away from either.
That said, the review burden is rough, that I can agree with. I outright felt compelled to evaluate whether the additional review burden did not outweigh the benefits, but at least for my tasks it did not. So grumpily, I simply live with that pain.
Maybe it helps if I mention that my line of work is DevOps and Operations. I have an ongoing suspicion that this area is better suited than average for agentic work. The codebases are relatively tiny, the languages and technologies used are very well represented in training data, and there's a decent amount of side chore. I can definitely imagine agents being a lot more frustrating to work with on proper, sizeable codebases, and the numbers simply no longer adding up. I don't have much of a first hand account with that.
My closest exposure is some personal toy projects, where getting the actual vision out there ended up requiring an inordinate number of turns (this is with a frontier model). In my estimation it was still worth it, but I definitely had to give it a back of the napkin calc.
As far as my work goes, it is of course not magic, creatively worded AWS docs will still trip it up (as they initially also do me). In those cases, my expertise is still required. But the well trodden is very well trodden, and I could cut out a lot of cruft, including a lot of organizational minutia, which I very much appreciate. I was able to burn through my backlog almost completely, for example.