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We're all CTO now

jamie.ideasasylum.com

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Re: We're all CTO now

#11

Post by artursapek »

donperignon wrote: post #8

Is not the first time that I read this kind of narrative, actually appears pretty often in my LinkedIn timeline. We are now managers of agents and now we are CTO of agents… this is plain delusional, you can play with the toys all day long, a mud cake won’t sell very well. This CTO doesn’t code much, I agree, if you are a contributor you know that so called agents are as useful as google and stack overflow on steroids…

Agents are definitely more useful than Google and SO… have you tried pair programming with Claude 4 Opus and building something? It’s amazing.

Re: We're all CTO now

#12

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

In practice I think it will more resemble a flood of script kiddies than CTOs. The average person isn't as thoughtful as the author, they just want to close their tickets with the least effort possible. Not that that attitude towards work is specific to tech workers.

Re: We're all CTO now

#13

Post by noitpmeder »

hnthrow90348765 wrote: post #6

>And with those new skills, your old skills will start to atrophy. Skills don't work like muscles, please stop with this thinking model of the world. No one is going to fire you because you don't have the same speed of recall of language constructs and have to look more things up. Speed of coding is not the damn bottleneck. Plus have a little faith in your brain that you could get back to that point if you wanted to.

This is absolutely not true. Think of all the studying that is required before applying to tech jobs these days. Sure someone won't fire you because you can't balance a binary tree by hand, but it certainly might exclude you from getting that next job, regardless of if it applies to their day to day workloads.

If people stop manually coding their ability to do so WILL atrophy. Take away the coding agents and you'll soon have a generation of graduates wondering why their tab complete isn't writing the entire feature for them.

Re: We're all CTO now

#14

Post by yoav »

matt3210 wrote: post #3

Author assumes we’re going to use AI more and more. I don’t agree. I regularly out perform the AI pushers on my team and I can talk about engineering in person too!

Maybe that’s because the AI pushers are compensating for already not being as good.

What happens when other yous start using ai. I suspect they will obv outperform you just in sheer typing speed.

Re: We're all CTO now

#15

Post by XenophileJKO »

artursapek wrote: post #11
donperignon wrote: post #8

Is not the first time that I read this kind of narrative, actually appears pretty often in my LinkedIn timeline. We are now managers of agents and now we are CTO of agents… this is plain delusional, you can play with the toys all day long, a mud cake won’t sell very well. This CTO doesn’t code much, I agree, if you are a contributor you know that so called agents are as useful as google and stack overflow on steroids…

Agents are definitely more useful than Google and SO… have you tried pair programming with Claude 4 Opus and building something? It’s amazing.

Exactly. Having built a few non-trivial projects with Claude Code, you can act as a CTO. At least that is one semi feasible way of using it.

I would say in a generation or two, you could operate in a way where you rarely have to dive into the code.

Re: We're all CTO now

#16

Post by skydhash »

hnthrow90348765 wrote: post #6

>And with those new skills, your old skills will start to atrophy. Skills don't work like muscles, please stop with this thinking model of the world. No one is going to fire you because you don't have the same speed of recall of language constructs and have to look more things up. Speed of coding is not the damn bottleneck. Plus have a little faith in your brain that you could get back to that point if you wanted to.

I learn new languages mostly for hirability or to explore new and fun concepts. After the realization that my job is solving problem and not using shiny tech, most of my reading has switched to what problems people are facing and possible solutions. And that usually involves a mix of theory (to understand) and best practices (as shortcuts).

There’s one optimization path that people seems to barely explore (other than editor nerds): navigation based on search and marking stuff for further actions. You see people using VS Code like notepad and they go on to complain that coding is tedious.

Re: We're all CTO now

#17

Post by artursapek »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #15
artursapek wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agents are definitely more useful than Google and SO… have you tried pair programming with Claude 4 Opus and building something? It’s amazing.

Exactly. Having built a few non-trivial projects with Claude Code, you can act as a CTO. At least that is one semi feasible way of using it. I would say in a generation or two, you could operate in a way where you rarely have to dive into the code.

I’ve been building a project in my spare time with CC and gotten at least 5x more done than I could have alone. Probably closer to 10. And it makes it easier to work when I’m kind of tired and would normally choose not to work on the project at all, because I can relax or do house chores while it crunches on a problem. It’s amazing.

Re: We're all CTO now

#18

Post by paulryanrogers »

artursapek wrote: post #11
donperignon wrote: post #8

Is not the first time that I read this kind of narrative, actually appears pretty often in my LinkedIn timeline. We are now managers of agents and now we are CTO of agents… this is plain delusional, you can play with the toys all day long, a mud cake won’t sell very well. This CTO doesn’t code much, I agree, if you are a contributor you know that so called agents are as useful as google and stack overflow on steroids…

Agents are definitely more useful than Google and SO… have you tried pair programming with Claude 4 Opus and building something? It’s amazing.

I have, and it does a mediocre to poor job, even at trivial tasks using popular stacks and languages. IME, one most either start with a green field, or babysit every step with/as an expert, or both. Perhaps I've just been unlucky or my projects have too much debt.

Re: We're all CTO now

#19

Post by CuriouslyC »

StopVibeCoding wrote: post #10
sokoloff wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, the more interesting question is whether you without AI can outperform you using AI, not whether you can outperform someone else who is using AI. I think AI has already gotten to a point to where it can help skilled devs be more productive.

I have tested this. I have been coding for close to 20 years, in anything from web to embedded. I got tired of hearing about vibe coding day in and day out, so I gave in, and I tried everything under the sun. For the first few days, I started to see the hype. I was much faster at coding, I thought, I can just type this small prompt to the LLM and it will do what I wanted, much faster than I could have. It worked! I d…

AI writes code according to the instructions given. You can instruct it to architect and organize the code any way you want. You got the fruit of your inarticulation.

Re: We're all CTO now

#20

Post by matthewfcarlson »

skydhash wrote: post #16
hnthrow90348765 wrote: post #6

>And with those new skills, your old skills will start to atrophy. Skills don't work like muscles, please stop with this thinking model of the world. No one is going to fire you because you don't have the same speed of recall of language constructs and have to look more things up. Speed of coding is not the damn bottleneck. Plus have a little faith in your brain that you could get back to that point if you wanted to.

I learn new languages mostly for hirability or to explore new and fun concepts. After the realization that my job is solving problem and not using shiny tech, most of my reading has switched to what problems people are facing and possible solutions. And that usually involves a mix of theory (to understand) and best practices (as shortcuts). There’s one optimization path that people seems to barely explore (other than…

Sounds rewarding, any particular resource you would recommend that you've enjoyed?
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