alt Hacker NewsLots of mentions of the term mourning... As they say in my country, don't sell the skin until you kill the bear.
All I'm seeing around me is people dropping best practices in a FOMO driven push for speed: let's stop reviews, let's drive 5 agents in parallel, let's not even look at the code!
This is going to blow up.
Only after we pick up the remains we'll find a more sustainable approach for AI usage. I suspect that version will still require crafters.
If we end up in a place where the craft truly is dead, then congratulations, your value probably just dropped to zero. Everyone who's been around startup culture knows the running jokes about those 'I have a great idea, I just need someone to code it' guys. Now you're one, and you'll find how much ideas are worth.
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> If we end up in a place where the craft truly is dead, then congratulations, your value probably just dropped to zero
I think the craft is going to die and am not thrilled about it. I dont feel like there is a contradiction there
The beginnings of that sustainable approach is already out there: https://boristane.com/blog/how-i-use-claude-code/
These bear related sayings always make me laugh. The one I was told by a Russian: “don’t argue over how to skin the bear before you’ve killed it”
A couple of guys at work have been raving about Claude. How quick they get stuff done, how great the code is, how working any other way is a waste of time.
I just had the misfortune today to wade into one of their codebases. It's 60k lines of code for something that should have been simple, and it's an absolute fucking mess. I'm gonna have to rip out most of it and start over just to get it to do what we actually need it to do.
I use LLMs, they come in handy, and I use agents, but this "have agents do everything" nonsense is a disaster, and it's only going to get worse.
On the upside I'm getting paid to fix this shit show.
>This is going to blow up.
We are way past wringing our hands over agentic engineering. Every startup and all fast moving companies are onboard. They don't hand code anymore. There will not be some code quality crisis that will stop everyone in their tracks. I'm trying to cope with this too, but I don't think the best path is praying for failure.
I was still skeptical at the start of this year, but there seems to be a shift underway. Found the StrongDM Dark Factory docs in Feb and they've netted novel results that have been inspiring enough to keep studying and practicing.
https://factory.strongdm.ai/techniques
https://factory.strongdm.ai/products/attractor
If you've found better or ancillary resources, please share.
> If we end up in a place where the craft truly is dead, then congratulations, your value probably just dropped to zero
I think, then that the value of all knowledge work will have dropped to zero. Software engineering is, to my mind, “intelligence complete.” If you can do it with knowledge work, you can have software do it.