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Grief and the AI split

blog.lmorchard.com

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Re: Grief and the AI split

#81

Post by autoexec »

operatingthetan wrote: post #21
torben-friis wrote: post #12

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 best practices in a FOMO driven push for speed: let's stop reviews, let's drive 5 agents in parallel, let's not even look at the code! This is going to blow up. Only after we pick up the remains we'll find a more sustainable approach for AI usage. I suspect that…

>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.

> 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.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#82

Post by Copyrightest »

operatingthetan wrote: post #21
torben-friis wrote: post #12

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 best practices in a FOMO driven push for speed: let's stop reviews, let's drive 5 agents in parallel, let's not even look at the code! This is going to blow up. Only after we pick up the remains we'll find a more sustainable approach for AI usage. I suspect that…

>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.

[dead]

Re: Grief and the AI split

#83

Post by suzzer99 »

HoldOnAMinute wrote: post #68

I am enjoying crafting really good requirements documents. I use an iterative process. The implementation is the test of the requirements document. If it's not right, I adjust the doc, discard that implementation, and try again.

> I am enjoying crafting really good requirements documents.

Can you please come train the product people at my job? Maybe some of your love of the game will rub off on them.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#84

Post by bigwheels »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #65
bigwheels wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/products/attractor If you've found better or ancillary resources, please share.

Wow! My productivity increased 100x after i stated listening to ad bots.

[flagged]

Re: Grief and the AI split

#86

Post by burningChrome »

Roguelazer wrote: post #36
operatingthetan wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

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.

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.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#87

Post by VoidWarranty »

operatingthetan wrote: post #48
Roguelazer wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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?

Both claims are hyperbole.

Reality remains in the middle, but there are plenty of examples of either extreme right now.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#88

Post by sublinear »

sarchertech wrote: post #69

I’ve heard this thesis a lot, but it’s almost always from the result chasers. It doesn’t resonate with me because I am a result chaser. I like woodworking because I like building something that never existed before. I don’t mind using a CNC router or a 3 printer to help me out. I don’t care about the process, I care about the result. But I care deeply about the quality of the result. I don’t care about the beauty of…

You seem to be conflating code quality with product integrity.

All those problems are caused by business decisions, not the developers. You do make a good point though that AI may enable more people to build their own when they can.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#89

Post by nlawalker »

>I think recognizing which kind of grief you're feeling is the actually useful thing here. If you're mourning the loss of the craft itself—the texture of writing code, the satisfaction of an elegant solution—that's real, and no amount of "just adapt" addresses it. You might need to find that satisfaction somewhere else, or accept that work is going to feel different. Frankly, we've been lucky there's been a livelihood in craft up to now.

The blog post is all about being clear-eyed about the source of grief, but doesn't seem to articulate that it's the livelihood that's gone, not the craft. There's never been a better time to practice the craft itself.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#90

Post by skydhash »

agentultra wrote: post #72
LPisGood wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

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.
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