alt Hacker News> Engineers can finally address security and tech debt!
I’ve been gradually moving test coverage up, updating packages with CVEs (even if in some cases it’s more like a migration), fixing more bugs, writing load testing solutions, fixing badly made architectural choices and recently even migrated a codebase away from Oracle onto PostgreSQL and figured out some pretty good settings for the DB itself with the aforementioned test tool. Oh and introduced Testcontainers to actually do proper DB tests.
None of this would have happened without agents that churn even while I sleep, but somehow that is still more work cause I have to iterate on their output a lot and come up with additional ProjectLint rules whenever something new comes up. It’s like burnout². Obviously I also bear the blame when the slop inevitably goes wrong despite efforts to keep it manageable, so maybe touching nothing would be better.
That is what I have learned over the last year. I still only have so much mental bandwidth. I can definitely do more now, but I have become relatively disciplined about what I nudge along each week with agents and it's okay if it doesn't happen in 2 days or 3 days. The efficiency gains are there. Agentic work is horrible for stealing our attention and the way it encodes in our brain as unfinished threads that occupy mental bandwidth. I keep it all in tasks now like everything else. Even "Go prompt agent X.". I have several projects I just prompt once a day with a thinking agent. And I only work on things that have some meaningful result driven outcome that aligns with my overall goals. No more "I am doing this because I can projects" or if I do start those they are much smaller and constrained. It helps. I still feel like I could be doing more, but I think it is a fundamental misalignment of how agentic workflows hijack our brain's reward system and I am extremely cautious about it now.