> But I think we're in world where very soon, companies will be demanding their engineering departments converge to the lived experience of the people who are seeing something like the author.
I think this part is very real.
If you’re in this thread saying “I don’t get it” you are in danger much faster than your coworker who is using it every day and succeeding at getting around AI’s quirks to be productive.
My wife manages 70 software developers. Her boss, the CIO, who has no practical programming experiece, is demanding her and her peers cut 50% of their staff in the next year.
> The real danger is if management sees this as acceptable. If so best of luck to everyone.
Already happening. It's just an extension of the "move fast and break stuff" mantra, only faster. I think the jury is still out on if more or less things will break, but it's starting to look like not enough to pump the brakes.
> Be careful here. I have more coworkers contributing slop and causing production issues than 10x’ing themselves.
Sure, many such cases. We'll all have work for a while, if only so that management has someone to yell at when things break in prod. And break they will -- the technology is not perfected and many are now moving faster than they can actually vet the results. There is obvious risk here.
But the curve we're on is also obvious now. I'm seeing massive improvements in reliability with every model drop. And the model drops are happening faster now. There is less of an excuse than ever for not using the tools to improve your productivity.
I think the near future is going to be something like a high-speed drag race. Going slow isn't an option. Everyone will have to go fast. Many will crash. Some won't and they will win.
> I think the near future is going to be something like a high-speed drag race. Going slow isn't an option. Everyone will have to go fast. Many will crash. Some won't and they will win.
I think this is right. This is what we as engineers have to wrap our minds around. This is the game we're in now, like it or not.
> Many will crash.
Aside from alignment, and some of these bigger picture concerns, prompt injection looms large. It's an astoundingly large, possibly unsolvable vector for all sorts of mayhem. But many people are making the judgment that there's too much to be gained before the shocks hit them. So far, they're right.
If a company lets faulty code get to production, that's an issue no matter how it is produced. Agentic coding can produce code at much higher volumes, but I think we're still in the early days of figuring out how to scale quality and the other nonfunctional requirements. (I do believe that we're literally talking about days, though, when it comes to some facets of some of these problems.)
But there's nothing inherent about agentic coding to lead to slop outcomes. If you're steering it as a human, you can tweak the output, by hand or agentically, until it matches your expectations. It's not currently a silver bullet.
That said, my experience is that the compressing of the research, initial draft process, and revision--all which used to be the bulk of my job--is radical.
I think this part is very real.
If you’re in this thread saying “I don’t get it” you are in danger much faster than your coworker who is using it every day and succeeding at getting around AI’s quirks to be productive.