alt Hacker NewsI agree that it's worrying that we're moving more and more towards implicit and opaque state. Hiding what exactly is getting edited, very limited tooling to check what the subagents are doing exactly, setting up scheduled and recurring tasks without it being obvious etc.
It's tending more and more towards pushing the user to treat the whole thing as a pure chat interface magic black box, instead of a rich dashboard that allows you to keep precise track of what's going on and giving you affordances to intervene. So less a tool view and more magic agent, where the user is not supposed to even think about what the thing is even doing. Just trust the process. If you want to know what it did, just ask it. If you want to know if it deleted all the files, just ask it in the chat. Or don't. Caring about files is old school. Just care about the chat messages it sends you.
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Here in SF I talk to people all day who see this as a feature, not a bug, and that's the persona Claude Code and Codex are selling to.
It started being proposed as a thought experiment "why should we care about the files if AI is going to do the edits", then as Opus got better and the hype built up, the rhetorical part of that dropped and now there are plenty of people who swear they don't write code at all anymore and don't see why anyone would.
I think we're in a feedback loop caused by the fact you can totally get away with not writing code anymore for some reasonably complex topics. But that doesn't account for the long term maintainability of the result, and it doesn't account for people who think they're not writing code, but are relying heavily on the fact we haven't fully magicked away the actual code. They're watching the agents like a hawk, doing small bits and pieces at a time, hitting stop when it starts thinking about the wrong thing, etc.
My worry is the market taking the wrong lesson out of the trends and prematurely trying to force the agent-first future well before the tools or the people are ready.
It does make WH40k seem more plausible. Tech priests praying to the capricious machine spirit to just please do the thing.