Are you referring to the author specifically? Or a specific hypocritical person you know? If you're making a general statement about groups of online people you might be falling for the group attribution error[1], where the characteristics of an individual are assumed to be reflective of the whole group.

In any case, two things can be simultaneously true:

1. Writing code is not the bottleneck, as in we can develop features faster than they can be deployed. 2. It's annoying and disruptive to be interrupted when doing work that requires deep focus.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_attribution_error

This is a false dichotomy. Software development has always been about keeping people in agreement, from the customer to the coder, and all the people in between (the fewer the better).

Meetings that increases sync between customer and coder are few and precious.

In large organisations ceremonial meetings proliferate for the wrong reasons. People like to insert themselves in the process between customer and coder to appear relevant.

I personally am fond of meetings with customers, end-users, UX designers, and actual stakeholders.

I loathe meetings with corporate busybodies who consume bandwidth for corporate clout.

No, I don’t need another middle manager to interface themselves between me and my users.

> nakedly hypocritical

How is it hypocritical?

If in the old world, the very important process that used up a lot of time and benefited greatly from no distractions was the actual writing of code then interruptions for various ceremonies with limited value other than generating progress reports for some higher ups would feel like a waste of time.

That same person in the 'new' world where writing code is very fast but understanding the business and technical requirements that need to be accomplished is the difficult part would then prioritize those ceremonies more and be ok with distractions while their AI agents are writing the code for them.

It's not hypocritical to change your opinion when the facts of the situation have changed.

Just because I hate those ' team meetings, agile ceremonies, issue trackers, backlogs, slack, emails, design reviews, and anything else that disrupted the hours of coding "flow state"' - doesn't mean I don't understand how important they were and are. I moaned them before, and will continue to - but they were always important. I have learned the hard way more than once what happens when you sit at a keyboard and write code (one time I lost my job because the code I was writing was so far out from what the company needed, the next I realized what was happening in time to leave first - only after I was gone did they realize that what I was doing really was important and they made me a good offer to come back)

Just because you use LLMs doesn't mean you don't need the "flow". Reading code SUCKS, getting into the flow is harder than ever.

Unless you sign off on a Looks Good to Me PR and go loiter by the kombucha machine. Then you have other problems.

You’re describing a multitude of different people with a variety of viewpoints. It’s also smart to change your mind when the environment changes; code being easy to write is a decisive shift.

> the same kind of engineer

Who?

There are millions of software engineers around the world. It's quite likely that they have a few different opinions and point of views!

I've had seniors tell me my entire career that writing code was the easiest part of their jobs.

Is it hypocrisy or learning? A more charitable take - it wasn't too many years ago that I also decried the need for all the collaboration. But as I advanced in my career, that worldview just didn't hold up. In this case, maybe the introduction of agentic coding has accelerated that learning because now 'regular' engineers are forced to take on coordination roles.

[With that said, the specific implementations of such collaboration are often still very painful and counterproductive...]

Looks like this comment is touching a nerve. This community is progressing from "AI can't write code", to "Well, AI can write code but it's not really about the code". I wonder where the goalposts will be moved next?

That's an oppinion for sure, and a very shallow, general oppinion. Some people like solving problems, sometimes via code, while others tend to hide behind the 'Collaboration' banner, to help their own career progression. Both are legitimate tracks. To dismiss one, is to make the other appear 'non-Good'. But, perhaps data can be furnished as part of this post to support either as 'better'.

There are 2 bands: you let people earn a living or you let investors/executives become richer every year to the detriment of workers. I don’t care about the medium, Im not with the big fishes

It's an astute observation but overstated. There are just as many programmers who view their activity as too sacred to consider using an LLM, even for relatively easy, predictable, or disposable work.

It's certainly the case that the collaborative ceremony can be mismanaged, and that is frustrating when you need time to implement. I don't expect that complaint to go away, those who are using AI heavily will replace it with not having enough time for prompting.

But I have also worked with some who refused to participate in collaboration, they felt their time and ideas superior to others, and there's no excuse for that.

They sound like very important people no matter what the circumstances are, haha.

Having "house rules" on a team that new members must agree to follow tends to flush such people out and they usually exit on their own when their shenanigans get repeatedly called out as violative. Gotta introduce the rules in the interview process and get agreement after they join. Catching them out early is the key.

We had an intervention on one hard case and he rage quit the next day. I don't know why people do that, it's a small world and people talk.

They are still anti-social. But they see the “social” as a way to feed the AI better, to make better code.

The focus is still the code.

Generally, groups of people aren't homogenous.

The contradictions you see could mostly be variations across individuals rather than hypocrisy within individuals.

(Doubly so for vaguely defined groups, like "kind of engineer".)

Comments like these are why I still come to HN. Absolute kino.

I feel attacked. I still dislike most team meetings, agile ceremonies, etc. Slack and emails give me anxiety. A 30 min meeting will disrupt me for 90 minutes. But, yea, the code was never the bottleneck. Except maybe when I worked at a startup. All of the above are true.

Personally I find it hilarious that the same people at my company who can't be bothered to write down detailed requirements and are constantly fighting any effort to do research or technical documentation or pay down tech debt are now trying vibe coding and struggling to produce anything useful. Oh you don't understand why you aren't getting the results you expected? Maybe you should try thinking deeper about what you expect before your rush your engineers or, now, your agents.

Just look at what they write. There is a correlation between the Agentic Multitasker and the type of person who wanted results and didn’t care about the coding in itself. That’s what they themselves keep writing.

They are not the same people.

> It's hilarious ... their most essential and sacred activity ... suddenly, and with no hint of shame ... the nakedly hypocritical attitude ... still extraordinary

Calm down the hyperventilating for two seconds, look around, and you’ll immediately see examples of the same group of people who now biTch aNd mOaN about how agentic coding is killing what they love about programming.

It’s interesting to see people either gloat or get incensed at the nerds who like computers in the context of these developments.

Yes this exactly, it's getting ridiculous at this point.

It's precisely because I get swamped with all the non-coding work that agentic coding works so well. And in multiple ways.

- it lets you get back in the flow faster (unless you were used to writing out your inner thinking monologues and reasoning to get yourself back to speed when you come back from a meeting).

- it lets you move faster and take on more on your own, meaning less people needed in the team, less communication/syncing/non-coding overhead.

If you're objective about it, AI coding is going to be amazing for individual productivity. It's probably going to fuck us (developers) over with the reduced demand, lower bargaining power, etc. But just on technical merits it's a great productivity tool.

The models are still not better than me at coding and handholding is required, but the speedups are undeniable, and we're long past the threshold of usefulness. So far all the contrarian takes are either shallow/reflexive pushback because people don't like the consequences, or people working in niche stuff where LLMs are not that great yet. But that has been shrinking with almost every release - in my experience.

I know everyone here writes cutting edge algorithms that were never encountered in the training data, their code is hyper optimized realtime bare metal logic that's used in life or death scenarios and LLMs are useless to them - but most of the stuff I do day to day is solve problems that have been solved before, in a slightly different context. LLMs are pretty good at that.

But the flow state wasn't just about typing code. The flow state was about understanding the problem, about loading it into your head so that you could "walk around in it" mentally, so that you could figure out that what really needed to happen was that module X needed to add a getter to value foo, that module Y needed to get foo and make a change based on the value, and that the key to making this all work was to add a way for Y to access X that fit within the existing architecture. That took focus, far more than implementing the pieces did.

I hate meetings when they're mismanaged, which is often. I like a good meeting. Probably what most swes would say.

Welcome in humanity my friend.

Also, expect harsh and rude reactions when pointing to big issues that are crystal clear in the middle of the village. Not all truths are warmly welcomed, especially when looking elsewhere feels more comfortable in the immediate experience.

Take care and don’t worry too much: the journey’s short, so remember to also enjoy the good parts.

no, these meetings are still hot garbage.

half the time you’re going to discover the right decision / path while you’re coding.

focus time went from hammering code to figuring out how to solve the problem. PRs are now how we exchange ideas. meetings are still productivity theater.