> The PR descriptions are more thorough than what I’d write, because it reads the full diff and summarises the changes properly. I’d gotten so used to the drudgery that I’d stopped noticing it was drudgery.
Who are you creating PR descriptions for, exactly? If you consider it "drudgery", how do you think your coworkers will feel having to read pages of generic "AI" text? If reviewing can be considered "drudgery" as well, can we also offload that to "AI"? In which case, why even bother with PRs at all? Why are you still participating in a ceremony that was useful for humans to share knowledge and improve the codebase, when machines don't need any of it?
> My role has changed. I used to derive joy from figuring out a complicated problem, spending hours crafting the perfect UI. [...] What’s become more fun is building the infrastructure that makes the agents effective. Being a manager of a team of ten versus being a solo dev.
Yeah, it's great that you enjoy being a "manager" now. Personally, that is not what I enjoy doing, nor why I joined this industry.
Quick question: do you think your manager role is safe from being automated away? If machines can write code and prose now better than you, couldn't they also manage other machines into producing useful output better than you? So which role is left for you, and would you enjoy doing it if "manager" is not available?
Purely rhetorical, of course, since I don't think the base premise is true, besides the fact that it's ignoring important factors in software development such as quality, reliability, maintainability, etc. This idea that the role of an IC has now shifted into management is amusing. It sounds like a coping mechanism for people to prove that they can still provide value while facing redundancy.
I think you'd like this post I wrote: https://neilkakkar.com/agentic-debt.html , parts of why I think we wouldn't get automated away just yet. It might be true eventually - and when it does happen, I'm sure I'll find something else to do, most probably up the stack. Managing for now seems like a terrible task for agents. I need to guide them to the right solution.
_Parts_ of what I write are drudgery, which gets automated away. The "why" we talk about in sync, so it's much less of an issue in general.
When I say management, I mean more like a staff engineer or a tech lead, rather than a traditional manager.