alt Hacker NewsI think the article nails it, on multiple counts. From personal experience, the cognitive overload is sneaky, but real. You do end up taking on more than you can handle, just because your mob of agents can do the minutia of the tasks, doesn't free you from comprehending, evaluating and managing the work. It's intense.
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Started referring to it as "speed of accountability".
A responsible developer will only produce code as fast as they can sign it off.
An irresponsible one will just shit all over the codebase.
I'm not sure I would agree in totem. Freeing the minutia allows for a higher cognitive load on the bigger picture. I use AI primarily for research gathering, and refining of what I have, which has freed up a lot of time to focus on the bigger issues, and specifically in my case, zeroing in on the diamond in the rough.
This has been my experience too. I feel freed up from the "manual labor" slice of software development and can focus on more interesting design problems and product alignment, which feels like a bit of a drug right now that i'm actually working harder and more hours.
do you think this is inherent in AI-related work, or largely due to the current state of the world, where it's changing rapidly and we're struggling to adapt our entire work systems to the shifting landscape, while under intense (and often false) pressures to "disrupt ourselves"? Put another way, if this was similarly true twenty years ago with the rise of Google, is it still true today?
That is fun though.
I hated the old world where some boomer-mentality "senior" dev(s) would take days or weeks to deliver ONE fucking thing, and it would still have bugs and issues.
I like the new world where individuals can move fast and ship, and if there are bugs and issues they can be resolved quickly.
The boomer-mentality and other mids get fired which is awesome, and orgs become way leaner.
Just because there are excess of CS majors and programmers doesn't mean we need to make benches that they can keep warm.
"Explain to me like I am five what you just did"
Then "Make a detailed list of changes and reasoning behind it."
Then feed that to another AI and ask: "Does it make sense and why?"
For a very small number of people the hard part is writing the code. For most of us, it’s writing the correct code. AI generates lots of code but for 90% of my career writing more code hasn’t helped.
> you do end up taking on more than you can handle, just because your mob of agents can do the minutia of the tasks, doesn’t free you from comprehending, evaluating and managing the work
I’m currently in an EM role and this is my life but with programmers instead of AI agents.