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When your manager gives you the task of building a complex product with a more or less vague "do what I mean" specification, and once a week shows up for 2 minu

When your manager gives you the task of building a complex product with a more or less vague "do what I mean" specification, and once a week shows up for 2 minutes to nudge you into a different direction, would you agree when the manager calls this his own "labour of love" when you did 99% of the actual work and thousands of micro-decisions along the way that your manager didn't even know had to be made?

kejdjejxjejdj 13d ago
That’s not even close to a valid analogy and I think (and hope) you know that. Because if you don’t… oof. You have a lot to learn.
- flohofwoe 13d ago
  So educate me then what I'm missing in the 'agentic loop' workflow, oh wise one ;) I'm using this sort of spec-driven + feedback-loop workflow at work to pretty to good effect, and would say I'm quite familiar with the pros and cons. IMHO the main downside is that you're simply not as familiar with the code base as before, unless you spend just as much time studying the LLM output as writing the code manually in the first place. E.g. you have about the same distance to the actual implementation as a manager of a traditional programming team who from time to time skims over the source code to check for signals that things start to go sideways, and otherwise mainly feeds feature specification tickets into the team which are coming from a separate 'design department'. I also would never call any of this work a 'labour of love' either. Not that this sort of soulless "specification-in-implementation-out" was much different before though, it's just how industrial software development works - essentially an assembly line for features.
  - isieidjeidj 12d ago
    Not OP but I’ll bite: > I also would never call any of this work a 'labour of love' either. That’s a you problem. This could very well be a labour of love and nothing about any of this precludes it from being a labour of love. > E.g. you have about the same distance to the actual implementation as a manager of a traditional programming team who from time to time skims over the source code to check for signals that things start to go sideways, and otherwise mainly feeds feature specification tickets into the team which are coming from a separate 'design department' I guess you’re rather young or not really acquainted with the history of computer science, because that’s the exact same argument people used to make about compilers… and then GUIs…and then high-level programming languages… and then OOP… the list goes on and on and on. Every time a new tool arrives that disrupts the way something is traditionally done, those that feel insecure about their work tend to lash out with the same “no true Scotsman” arguments. I’m not saying AI is perfect or that it replaces programmers in any way. What I’m saying is that it’s just a different way of going about the business of programming. It’s just yet another level of abstraction.

kejdjejxjejdj 13d ago

That’s not even close to a valid analogy and I think (and hope) you know that. Because if you don’t… oof. You have a lot to learn.

flohofwoe 13d ago
So educate me then what I'm missing in the 'agentic loop' workflow, oh wise one ;) I'm using this sort of spec-driven + feedback-loop workflow at work to pretty to good effect, and would say I'm quite familiar with the pros and cons. IMHO the main downside is that you're simply not as familiar with the code base as before, unless you spend just as much time studying the LLM output as writing the code manually in the first place. E.g. you have about the same distance to the actual implementation as a manager of a traditional programming team who from time to time skims over the source code to check for signals that things start to go sideways, and otherwise mainly feeds feature specification tickets into the team which are coming from a separate 'design department'. I also would never call any of this work a 'labour of love' either. Not that this sort of soulless "specification-in-implementation-out" was much different before though, it's just how industrial software development works - essentially an assembly line for features.
- isieidjeidj 12d ago
  Not OP but I’ll bite: > I also would never call any of this work a 'labour of love' either. That’s a you problem. This could very well be a labour of love and nothing about any of this precludes it from being a labour of love. > E.g. you have about the same distance to the actual implementation as a manager of a traditional programming team who from time to time skims over the source code to check for signals that things start to go sideways, and otherwise mainly feeds feature specification tickets into the team which are coming from a separate 'design department' I guess you’re rather young or not really acquainted with the history of computer science, because that’s the exact same argument people used to make about compilers… and then GUIs…and then high-level programming languages… and then OOP… the list goes on and on and on. Every time a new tool arrives that disrupts the way something is traditionally done, those that feel insecure about their work tend to lash out with the same “no true Scotsman” arguments. I’m not saying AI is perfect or that it replaces programmers in any way. What I’m saying is that it’s just a different way of going about the business of programming. It’s just yet another level of abstraction.