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Lots of mentions of the term mourning... As they say in my country, don't sell the skin until you kill the bear. All I'm seeing around me is people dropping be

• operatingthetan 7mo ago
  >This is going to blow up. We are way past wringing our hands over agentic engineering. Every startup and all fast moving companies are onboard. They don't hand code anymore. There will not be some code quality crisis that will stop everyone in their tracks. I'm trying to cope with this too, but I don't think the best path is praying for failure.
  • guelo 7mo ago
    Well nobody has had to pay the tech debt yet on the last 6 months of that insanity. I think the age-old SWE best practices will still hold in time.
  • Roguelazer 7mo ago
    That's absolutely not true. The places that have embraced "agentic engineering" are mostly garbage factories, and lots of places, including plenty of startups and fast-moving companies are staying off of this trend. I recognize that most of the people on this site are just trying to self-promote for their own gig, but the level of misinformation is sometimes just staggering.
    • operatingthetan 7mo ago
      >lots of places, including plenty of startups and fast-moving companies are staying off of this trend. Provide some examples then? Everyone who is all in on agentic code are pretty vocal about it. Who is declaring the opposite stance? Anyone?
      • VoidWarranty 7mo ago
        Both claims are hyperbole. Reality remains in the middle, but there are plenty of examples of either extreme right now.
    • sothatsit 7mo ago
      It is not just startups or small companies embracing agentic engineering… Stripe published blog posts about their autonomous coding agents. Amazon is blowing up production because they gave their agents access to prod. Google and Microsoft develop their own agentic engineering tools. It’s not just tech companies either, massive companies are frequently announcing their partnerships with OpenAI or Anthropic. You can’t just pretend it’s startups doing all the agentic engineering. They’re just the ones pushing the boundaries on best practices the most aggressively.
    • burningChrome 7mo ago
      Want something to be terrified of? I work at a massive health care company. They're 100% on the AI bandwagon and are putting AI everywhere they can. Billing, Software, DevOps, everywhere. If you think you can give an Agent some information and have go to work for some user, its 100% on the table for the company to do and either a) then outsource the rest offshore or b) lay the person off or shrink the department to increase the bottom line. Your healthcare, right now, is being offloaded to AI agents and bots and this is only the beginning.
      • lp0_on_fire 7mo ago
        I literally just sat through the annual “choose your healthcare” plan bullshit and the “meeting” was literally one of the Hr people pulling up a power point narrated by “AI”. You could tell in the first ten seconds. You’d think our plans would be cheaper given they’re offloading all this work to agents they don’t have to pay a salary to…right?
  • techpression 7mo ago
    Outwards communication and inside results tend to differ vastly. I’ve heard some true horror stories already from companies who claim they’re doing amazing things with great results. You should be especially on guard if it’s a publicly traded company, selling AI usage is necessary to appease the market (and thereby C-level stock value).
    • operatingthetan 7mo ago
      >Outwards communication and inside results tend to differ vastly. This is a good call out, but I'm talking to a lot of friends at other companies. So my perspective is informed by both news and personal anecdote.
      • techpression 7mo ago
        Sure, it goes both ways, I’m having great results at the startup I’m working at too.
  • torben-friis 7mo ago
    Just out of the popularity of the claim, I’ll bite. Both big tech and startups are now full of people working at 10x, features are written as fast as PMs can think them, monoliths self heal with agents buzzing over them. 10x means 10 times the outcomes in a given amount of time, so did you see the last iOS version pack a decade worth of features in a single release? Do you remember when meta moved their backend to rust in a month? What about Microsoft software not having a single bug in a year? Yeah, me neither.
    • operatingthetan 7mo ago
      I didn't say anything about increased productivity or 10x. Feel free to revise your strawman.
      • afavour 7mo ago
        If there’s no increased productivity then what’s the point in spending all the money?
        • operatingthetan 7mo ago
          I didn't say there was or there wasn't. They just don't get to infer that I did and then attack that as my position.
          • sifar 7mo ago
            What is your position? Genuinely asking as someone who is similarly trying to cope and doesn't want to travel down the road being trampled on. Primarily because it doesn't make me better, it doesn't benefit me as an individual and takes the joy out from understanding things.
      • torben-friis 7mo ago
        Fair, let’s revise it then. If not productivity, what’s the result AI is getting that is disruptive enough to make our previous work obsolete?
  • autoexec 7mo ago
    > I don't think the best path is praying for failure. Embrace it "Embrace failure" is exactly the attitude every company is going to take. They've already been working at bottoming out our expectations. We should have been running companies out of business with regulations and abandonment when their human-written software leaked our private data to criminals, or when their untested forced-updates shut down our systems and sent our IT teams scrambling, or when their unoptimized code forced us to upgrade our hardware or negated any performance gains we should have seen from investing in upgrades. The quality, reliability, and security of the software we all use and depend on is going to nosedive, and companies already know they can get away with it. They aren't going to start caring about how we feel about that now. "Pay more and settle for less" is where we are today. "Embrace Failure" is the future we're sprinting towards.
  • Copyrightest 7mo ago
    [dead]
• amarant 7mo ago
  The beginnings of that sustainable approach is already out there: https://boristane.com/blog/how-i-use-claude-code/ https://boristane.com/blog/how-i-use-claude-code/
• bigwheels 7mo ago
  I was still skeptical at the start of this year, but there seems to be a shift underway. Found the StrongDM Dark Factory docs in Feb and they've netted novel results that have been inspiring enough to keep studying and practicing. https://factory.strongdm.ai/techniques https://factory.strongdm.ai/techniques https://factory.strongdm.ai/products/attractor https://factory.strongdm.ai/products/attractor If you've found better or ancillary resources, please share.
  • yoyohello13 7mo ago
    Wow! My productivity increased 100x after i stated listening to ad bots.
    • bigwheels 7mo ago
      [flagged]
• RayVR 7mo ago
  These bear related sayings always make me laugh. The one I was told by a Russian: “don’t argue over how to skin the bear before you’ve killed it”
• LPisGood 7mo ago
  > If we end up in a place where the craft truly is dead, then congratulations, your value probably just dropped to zero I think, then that the value of all knowledge work will have dropped to zero. Software engineering is, to my mind, “intelligence complete.” If you can do it with knowledge work, you can have software do it.
  • agentultra 7mo ago
    That’s not the point of nor the reason for knowledge work. The fundamental mechanism of knowledge work is people. They haven’t changed at all. And what they need to understand and learn hasn’t changed. All the agents in the world and all of the methane guzzling data centres can’t tell you what to write in the specification nor if what the computer has generated faithfully implements that specification.
    • skydhash 7mo ago
      Yep. Most knowledge work is about coordination between people and transporting the right information to the people that are thinking and the people that are doing (not always separate groups, but can be one group switching mode). You need people because there's a lot of shared context between individuals in society that is not encoded anywhere.
      • dd8601fn 7mo ago
        A year ago everyone was sure these things couldn’t write functional code. A few months ago people started saying they need to be operated by people who could otherwise write the code. It sounds like we’re headed towards… the guy in Office Space who took specifications from the customer via a secretary and gave those to the engineers (and we know what happened to him). But I’m not sure that’s a thing, at least for long, either. The original super power of these things wasn’t that they could write code. It was that they could very competently extract meaning from natural language, debug what you were saying from the terrible way you expressed it, and still formulate competent answers. That doesn’t sound like a comfortable place for former devs to sit for the next few years.
• scuff3d 7mo ago
  A couple of guys at work have been raving about Claude. How quick they get stuff done, how great the code is, how working any other way is a waste of time. I just had the misfortune today to wade into one of their codebases. It's 60k lines of code for something that should have been simple, and it's an absolute fucking mess. I'm gonna have to rip out most of it and start over just to get it to do what we actually need it to do. I use LLMs, they come in handy, and I use agents, but this "have agents do everything" nonsense is a disaster, and it's only going to get worse. On the upside I'm getting paid to fix this shit show.
  • antonvs 7mo ago
    > On the upside I'm getting paid to fix this shit show. A lot of my career has been this, not due to choice but circumstance. Startups write terrible code, in general. Enterprises write terrible code. I’ve worked with both. If it becomes important enough, someone has to fix it at some point. Current AI models seem to be job security machines for that kind of work.
  • Ferret7446 7mo ago
    Devil's advocate: perhaps you are holding a hammer complaining about rivets. If you used AI to interact with the code instead, you wouldn't have to wade through the mess and might have gotten what you needed fairly easily, except you're using the wrong tool for the job
    • scuff3d 7mo ago
      Bad code is bad code, doesn't matter how it was generated.
• ianm218 7mo ago
  > If we end up in a place where the craft truly is dead, then congratulations, your value probably just dropped to zero I think the craft is going to die and am not thrilled about it. I dont feel like there is a contradiction there
  • Ferret7446 7mo ago
    There's no contradiction, but if/when it happens, being "not thrilled" will overflow off the bottom of your list of concerns