alt Hacker News> The new skill is mastering the craft of directing cheap inputs toward valuable outcomes.
Strongly agree with this. It took me awhile to realize that "agentic engineering" wasn't about writing software it was about being able to very quickly iterate on bespoke tools for solving a very specific problem you have.
However, as soon as you start unblocking yourself from the real problem you want to solve, the agentic engineering part is no longer interesting. It's great to be solving a problem and then realize you could improve it very quickly with a quick request to an agent, but you should largely be focused on solving the problem.
Yet I see so many people talking about running multiple agents and just building something without much effort spent using that thing, as though the agentic code itself is where the value lies. I suspect this is a hangover from decades where software was valuable (we still have plenty of highly valued, unprofitable software companies as a testament to this).
I'm reminded a bit of Alan Watts' famous quote in regards to psychedelics:
> If you get the message, hang up the phone.
If you're really leveraging AI to do something unique and potentially quite disruptive, very quickly the "AI" part should become fairly uninteresting and not the focus of your attention.
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It's funny that so many people are using AI and still hasn't really shown up in productivity numbers or product quality yet. I'm going to be really confused if this is still the case at the end of the year. A whole year of access to these latest agentic models has to produce visible economic changes or something is wrong.
That's a great insight about iterating on bespoke tools. I have seen the most speed up when diving into new tools, or making new tools as AI can make the initial jump quite painless, and I can get straight to the problem solving. But I get barely any speedup using it on legacy projects in tools I know well. Often enough it slows me down so net benefit is nil or worse.
Another commentor said it makes the easy part easy, and the hard part harder, which I resonate with at the moment.
I am pretty excited by being able to jump deep into real problems without code being the biggest bottleneck. I love coding but I love solving problems more, and coding for fun is very different to coding for outcomes.