Comment by ffsm8

Sure, but even worse, is the state-of-the-art: they use a cli agent and the "copy-paste, try to run, paste error, try to run" loop is called "Agentic engineering." Now we have to believe they're 10/10?

I see no difference there except speed at the cost of whatever little understanding may have been gained by the manual inspection between steps.

I think the worst is when they are skilled.

You're basically describing my work day. My job went from interesting, highly skilled work to mostly horrible brain rot over the past year.

It's depressing and I don't know a way out. Other then a complete career change, throwing away 30 years of experience and a matching salary.

I'm not a dev and that's exactly what I do but I also have absolutely no skill in coding, and am not paid...

People doing that will be replaced, in best case scenario, by cheap labor, and worst case by computers.

I think I’m pretty skilled, or at least I was, but much of my work now looks like this. The fact is in many cases Claude can diagnose and fix the issue quicker than I can even read it. It would be crazy not to take advantage of this. Of course it does get hard to resist the temptation to just become ever lazier over time.

This is my exact process nowadays when debugging some weird Linux wifi driver issue or something that came up after upgrade.

But that's because I don't have any real familiarity with the systems involved and I don't expect that gaining such familiarity will benefit me. If I am working on a system or product I'm responsible for at my job, it should be a different situation.

This is a sign of poor harness configuration and/or org level constraints (lack of MCP support, etc.) With properly configured and prompted agents error copy-pasta should be the exception not the norm.

The incentives for developing juniors have become misaligned as the expected stay in a company dwindled from decades to years to maybe year.

It would make sense to develop juniors if most of their comp was a four year vest but that doesn't happen until later. And in your first year or two you're usually a net negative... This is even more true with AI.

I think the "meat proxy" people are mediocre regardless of whether or not the were brilliant pre-AI. They've reduced themselves to a copy-paste go-between for claude and slack (or github or jira or whatever) and are mediocre now. If only they could turn back the clock...

I think people tend to forget that not only do we ourselves have different skillsets and can be amazing at one thing but horrible but another, but this also applies to other people in the world! Far all we know, there is an amazing developer out there who without LLMs, might have been the single best developer in the country, but even this person might not be able to figure out how to effectively work with LLMs. And vice-versa too.

Maybe this «spearheading AI person» just sucks at AI related stuff, as clearly that approach is bananas, but they could still be a OK developer.

Infinitely, that's a stretch.

Over the past year maybe 1.5x to 2.0x for me. As in: I can work on two projects at the same time with reduced amount of context switch. But that's it for me.

Maybe I don't have the brains for 1000x terminal agent coding, but 2 parallel projects seems like my saturation point.

I do believe there's a tiny subset of people who are more productive with AI, in the same way that Erdős was more productive with amphetamine.

But most who keep on going about their 10x productivity gain are indistinguishable from that one obnoxious guy at a party who won't shut up about his Ayahuasca retreat last spring. And they think they're Erdős.

The ones who get more productive are either the very incompetent who get pulled up to the AI-floor level, or the very competent who know when and how to use it and for what. The midwits are too proud to use it and instead placate themselves that their precious skill is more special and immune to mechanization than it really is.

Many many people have jobs where their contribution is granting access to deliberately undocumented things, like knowing where the config files are and some such. They hate the idea of AI. For my non IT friends its great for diagnosing wifi issues. It's also great for competent network engineers. It's not great for those who gain a salary due to having memorized some actions or settings that they don't even understand much. Note that this group has also already resisted traditional script automation, just like US dock workers who resist automation.

This sounds like true hell. I am very sorry.

Sounds to me like developer jobs are not going away after all. Somebody needs to understand what the AI communicates.

Sounds more like job security to me.

Have you tried putting those explanations into your repo?

wow. what a nightmare.

> Aren't you clever knowing the periodic table symbol for gold!

I don't usually like to gatekeep but knowing that "Au==gold" is one of those basic facts that everybody on a forum like hacker news should know and find unremarkable.

You might even say it's puts on sunglasses periodic table stakes.

I disagree...

Actual intelligence might be[0] to know what typos (of any kind) are fun to riff off.

Maybe this didn't hit the mark for you, but it got a chuckle out of me (especially considering the last hype before AI was crypto).

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[0] I don't even try to figure that out anymore, in a few years I'll pick the definition that I think best captures my thoughts

> ...

See that way too often in comments like this. Anyway, it was pretty likely they knew it was a typo, it was just a funny response.

I think you missed that the actual intelligence knew that it was a typo, and that the joke they made riffed on pretending that they did not know.