My old job feels distant now

My journey from hand-written code to agents is very similar. I think once a person exposed to agents goes through initial "I want to build anything I can think of" psychosis, it results in a much more productive workflow.

I've been spending less and less time glued to my screen, and more time thinking about concepts, as well as doing thing I like. The key for me was realizing that building with agents is very fun, but not every idea is worth building.

I am not too worried about the future of my career, as long as I stay in sync with the latest tools (agents). I think of it as elevator operators being misplaced by elevator controllers: the ones who refused to upskill into elevator technicians probably did not get a return offer. Not because nobody needed people to work with elevators, but because their skills were not economically valuable anymore.

I miss the old days (which were just a few years ago?).

I was someone who got into tech because they enjoyed coding as a mental exercise, not because they wanted to get rich. I feel like the fun part of the job has been now been automated away. All that remains is the boring part that I previously tolerated as a necessary evil: aligning stakeholders, kissing management ass, obsessing over the performance review cycle.

I know that some people have the inverse relationship: they find the "boring" part to be energizing and the "fun" part to be tedious. And I've seen a couple coworkers experiment with using Claude to agentically caress their boss's derriere. That's good for them and I wish them all the best. As for me, hopefully I can last long enough to engineer an early retirement. Then maybe I'll contribute to open source, assuming that there still is a FOSS community left by then.

My favorite part about gushing about the new age of AI development is how oblivious the authors always seem to be about the next phase.

It's always some variation of: the LLMs are incredible and gaining logical and reasoning ability at an astounding rate, but fortunately they will always need me to sit here to hit the "Enter" key.

I envy their optimism.

    I want the UI to be snappy. I used to dictate using
    observables and other optimization preferences - and
    sometimes still do. But I can also merely add
    constraints - the image should process within 15ms
    presses <enter>. Oh shoot - I meant to write 150ms
    but… oh… I guess lets simply see i the model can do
    it? Wow. I realize… I need to re-evaluate what I
    think of as possible and not.

Claude Code wished me a restful night of sleep (seriously), and when I came back in the morning it had diligently chewed through the problem and was consistently getting the results I'd asked for.

Just like people still use typewriters, make their own clothes, or cook themselves dinner etc. We can still hand craft code. There may always be a market for it too, like Rolls Royce.

However, I agree with OP, that the career in the main has changed. The cost of an engineer is probably going to fall precipitously once we hit saturation point. (I believe we're running on a backlog of software that was previously economically infeasible to make right now). IDK how long that will take (10 months? 10 years? 10 decades?)

But I do think LoC is going to fall in price to be like rice, a lot of the world just gives it away for free (to it's poor) because it's so plentiful. If AGI hits we may see many other goods follow.

next time op comes up for air is when he finds out their employer replaced them with a college student making $10/hour.

I’m so happy I quit tech a year ago. this guy is driving straight off a cliff and doesn’t even seem to realize.

curious, is this the default culture at tech companies now?

I am transfixed watching gpt-sol-6-1 program all day non-stop. I am building a succesor to my web2.0 groupware platform and now on a low budget you can get the code built without having financial backing. Strategy is now what you need to get usage. How to grab customers who are unhappy with big players and want a more bespoke system.

I realized recently that I no longer get stuck. I don't sit and figure something out for a few hours, trying thing after thing. "Banging my head against the wall" isn't really part of my vocab anymore.

Another article of unbridled enthusiasm after finding a new religion.

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