But if you hit "tab" it'll claim that as an AI-edited line, LOL.
(A lot of the rest of it is stuff I could already have been doing just as fast if I'd ever bothered to learn to use multiple cursors, learned vim navigation, or set up some macros—I never did because my getting-code-on-the-screen speed without those has never been slow enough to hold anything up, in practice)
Probably there is no dichotomy going on and it depends on multiple factors, but it seems so weird to see reports that are so different between each other.
If you are making extremely specific, high quality products over a long time window and your founders are deeply experienced in that field of engineering, then no, you don't need agentic engineering and probably want very little llm code in general (outside of some boilerplate, internal toolings, etc).
This is work related. So you can't expect everyone to have the same input demands or output expectations.
> Probably there is no dichotomy
It's literally staring you in the face.
Yes, and that’s a good thing! This is in fact where a lot of AI value lies. You dont need to know that command anymore - knowing the functional contract is now sufficient to perform the requisite work duties. This is huge!
Of course I lose about as much time as I save to its fuck-ups, so I'd still have been better off learning to actually use a text editor properly. Though (as I mentioned in a another post) part of why I've never done that in 25ish years of writing code for pay is that my code-writing speed has never been too slow for any of the businesses I've worked in, i.e. other things move slowly enough it never mattered.
:^)
I find it hard to read "You can do things without knowing things" as a positive improvement in work, society, life, anywhere
It's hard to tell anymore because I have encountered people who genuinely do seem to think that disliking AI is gatekeeping somehow
If AI breaks production this way, you just tell AI to fix it! And look, now you've consumed tokens twice. Think on that and I'll see you at the end-of-year performance review.
> If AI breaks production this way, you just tell AI to fix it! And look, now you've consumed tokens twice. Think on that and I'll see you at the end-of-year performance review.
I use the shit out of opencode to do things as a force multiplier, not as a way to keep me from knowing what its doing.
The point at which we're optimizing for "we don't need to know that anymore" is the point at which everything blows up, because agentic work is not fully deterministic, models hallucinate even simple things.
Blindly relying on your agent weapon of choice to just do the right thing because you didn't take the time to understand how the lego fits together is an actual problem.
I have a pretty good sense of the quality of work my coworkers output, where they tend to struggle, where they're talented, what level of review is required, what I should double check, etc.
By contrast LLMs are more like picking a contractor out of a hat. Even with good guardrails the quality and types of issues vary wildly prompt to prompt.
Quite frankly it was embrassing. I lost trust in that persons ability to solve problems.
Someone with better knowledge could work 100x faster using 100x fewer resources. But you did it the slow expensive way so you didn't have to think? Odd flex.
A coworker created a shared Claude Code skill in our repo.
It's obviously something that can be done as a python or bash+jq script and run deterministically.
Instead we use natural language and waste tokens for that.
As time passes and the layers of abstraction pile up, later generations won't understand the underlying layers of the abstraction. This is a huge weakness in our systems development -- and a huge potential attack surface for adversaries.
At one point seemingly out of nowhere he pointed out on his screen share "Look at how many tokens I've used this month. I run so much Opus." It was a number that was offensively large.
I remember thinking "That's a really odd flex, this crap is so expensive the fact that you use so much should be a red flag"
He demonstrated a number of Claude Code use cases he had to manage and tweak AWS infrastructure that made me, the old greybeard sysadmin older than the internet think "You've used AI to do something that was a single command."
So this story makes sense. They were being encouraged to just blast away at it six plus months ago.