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The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers

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Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers

#11

Post by azinman2 »

solomatov wrote: post #9
aanet wrote: post #5

I feel this is not discussed enough. I can attest to this 100%. Just the past weekend, I was talking with a very senior engineer (~distinguished engineer at a very large tech co) who basically said he's working 8-8-6 (8 am - 8 pm, 6 days/week), "writing code" (more like supervising 8-15 agents) for a product demo in 2 weeks, which otherwise would have taken at least 1 quarter's worth of time with a small team. He's z…

> more like supervising 8-15 agents How do they do it? (My own record is 5 agents, but it is not typical). Do they use gastown or something?

I often have 10+ running in parallel. I’m attacking parallel problems that aren’t interdependent. Sometimes adding additional products can bring me up to 15+.

Gotta have really good test harnesses so they can largely fix themselves.

Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers

#12

Post by peterashford »

ggm wrote: post #4
solomatov wrote: post #2

Is there any publication which demonstrates that the improvement is really 10x?

It's like "decimate" -you would think 10x had literal force, but it's more figurative. It just means "moar" (decimate had specific literal intent. Now it's just a force modifier like bigly)

The literal meaning was removing 1/10

Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers

#13

Post by solomatov »

azinman2 wrote: post #11
solomatov wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> more like supervising 8-15 agents How do they do it? (My own record is 5 agents, but it is not typical). Do they use gastown or something?

I often have 10+ running in parallel. I’m attacking parallel problems that aren’t interdependent. Sometimes adding additional products can bring me up to 15+. Gotta have really good test harnesses so they can largely fix themselves.

But how do you cover such amount of multi tasking? Could you give an example? I mean what kind of tasks allow such a parallelization?

Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers

#14

Post by strange_quark »

aanet wrote: post #5

I feel this is not discussed enough. I can attest to this 100%. Just the past weekend, I was talking with a very senior engineer (~distinguished engineer at a very large tech co) who basically said he's working 8-8-6 (8 am - 8 pm, 6 days/week), "writing code" (more like supervising 8-15 agents) for a product demo in 2 weeks, which otherwise would have taken at least 1 quarter's worth of time with a small team. He's z…

If if this person really is a distinguished engineer, then they are part of leadership and it's their responsibility to set realistic expectations. Leadership knows this, they just don't care and won't care until the job market improves.

Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers

#15

Post by zthrowaway »

Can definitely attest to this. The frequency of outages at my company have increased drastically the past year, especially ever since incorporating agentic development. I’m seeing all of the dev best practices go out the window. We have a few vibe coders that are posting 15-30 PR’s per day. It’s way too much for us to review. We’re not a big shop. I think we’re going to have to hire more people just to review code across the industry. And those people will have to know how to actually write software otherwise what are they even reviewing. Maybe the models will get so good they never make a mistake. Doubt it.

Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers

#17

Post by strange_quark »

aetherspawn wrote: post #16

… how are you getting actual usable output at that scale? I have to baby my AI in 1 minute increments or it just doesn’t arrive at the correct solution at all. Using Codex 5.2

I mean, why do you think people are burning out?

Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers

#18

Post by TuringNYC »

I can attest to this. Ultimately I dont think it is possible to 10x output systems with AI and actually keep the traditional quality controls (yet.)

IMHO you just need two stacks -- systems where you can play fast and loose and 10x output. And systems where quality matters where you can perhaps 1.5 or 2x. That is still a lot of output.

Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers

#19

Post by nemosaltat »

peterashford wrote: post #12
ggm wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like "decimate" -you would think 10x had literal force, but it's more figurative. It just means "moar" (decimate had specific literal intent. Now it's just a force modifier like bigly)

The literal meaning was removing 1/10

> Removing 1/10

feels euphemistic for the original “colloquial” usage I have for it.

> The killing of one in ten, chosen by lots, from a rebellious city or a mutinous army was a punishment sometimes used by the Romans. The word has been used (loosely and unetymologically, to the irritation of pedants) since 1660s for "destroy a large but indefinite number of." [0]

[0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/decimate

Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers

#20

Post by htrp »

solomatov wrote: post #13
azinman2 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often have 10+ running in parallel. I’m attacking parallel problems that aren’t interdependent. Sometimes adding additional products can bring me up to 15+. Gotta have really good test harnesses so they can largely fix themselves.

But how do you cover such amount of multi tasking? Could you give an example? I mean what kind of tasks allow such a parallelization?

context switching across the entirety of the feature surface for an app

You could easily have agents to work on login page, messaging feature, database/data model update, recommender system, backend api, etc

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