zlacker

>>tablet+(OP)
"Kids today don’t just use agents; they use asynchronous agents. They wake up, free-associate 13 different things for their LLMs to work on, make coffee, fill out a TPS report, drive to the Mars Cheese Castle, and then check their notifications. They’ve got 13 PRs to review. Three get tossed and re-prompted. Five of them get the same feedback a junior dev gets. And five get merged."

I would jump off a bridge before I accepted that as my full-time job.

I've been programming for 20+ years and I've never wanted to move into management. I got into programming because I like programming, not because I like asking others to write code on my behalf and review what they come up with. I've been in a lead role, and I certainly do lots of code review and enjoy helping teammates grow. But the last fucking thing I want to do is delegate all the code writing to someone or something else.

I like writing code. Yes, sometimes writing code is tedious, or frustrating. Sometimes it's yak-shaving. Sometimes it's Googling. Very often, it's debugging. I'm happy to have AI help me with some of that drudgery, but if I ever get to the point that I feel like I spend my entire day in virtual meetings with AI agents, then I'm changing careers.

I get up in the morning to make things, not to watch others make things.

Maybe the kind of software engineering role I love is going to disappear, like stevedores and lamplighters. I will miss it dearly, but at least I guess I got a couple of good decades out of it. If this is what the job turns into, I'll have to find something else to do with my remaining years.

>>munifi+6f
That snippit you quoted sounds like what some aristocratic fop that has never worked a day in their life creative writes while they are LARP'ing what they think the poor's ideal workday would sound like in an AI sales pitch meeting.

It rings about as authentic as "everybody stood up and clapped"

>>citize+kQ
You say that, but I hear AI folks talk about that user experience all the time.

And at some level, it makes sense. There are a lot of extroverts out there for whom the ideal job really is feeling like an orchestra conductor delegating and coordination an army of others. There is a great feeling of empowerment in watching a group build something bigger than you could have made on your own. And, if you're not someone who really likes to get their hands dirty and do the thing yourself, why not aspire towards a style of working that always feels that high level and powerful?

And, obviously, people who are wired that way are exactly the kind of people to move into management and executive roles and end up being in charge of and evangelizing AI to the world. So it's no surprise you hear people talking about this style of working all the time.

I'm 47. I've had the opportunity to move into management many times. I've been in a lead role enough to know the positive sides of that job and I deeply enjoy the soft skills part of working with a team.

I just know who I am and know that on days where I don't feel like I really made something concrete myself, I feel like I didn't live a real day.