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The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers
31–40 of 78 posts
Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers
#32> The industry calls this “10x productivity.” I call it what it is: a system that generates output at machine speed and forces humans to process it at biological speed. The question is can you tolerate the amount of PRs thrown at you per day on top of reviewing the exponentially growing mess of code that continues to double every hour and being paid less for it. Just learn to say no and leave. Why do you tolerate the…
The job market under our Great Leader has taken away a lot of this agency. Software engineers have gone from having the pick of the market for themselves to becoming (perceived as) next to disposable.
Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers
#33Can 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 ac…
The proposed industry solution is to use agents to review PRs, as not to slow down the velocity of delivery...
My current workplace is going through a major "realignment" exercise to replace as many testers with agents as humanely possible, which proved to be a challenge when the existing process is not well documented.
Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
We have our doubts about this. Can you share your code or product?
Anecdotally, my mistakes and lack of understanding exponentiate the more I try to parallelize.
Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers
#35Can 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 ac…
I wonder if the PR workflow is just unsustainable in the agentic era. Rather than review every new feature or bug fix, we would depend on good test coverage, and hold developers accountable for what they ship. The result might be more faulty code getting merged, but if you already have outages and can't review every PR, is there currently a meaningful benefit to the PR workflow?
This is the "if you're already letting faults through, why not give up trying to stop faults?" approach.
Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers
#36… 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?
Due to prolonged stress, which lack of control is the main contributor e.g. you have expectations, you cannot control variable x,y,z, which leads to stress, which over long period of causes burn out.
Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers
#37… 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
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Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers
#38Can 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 ac…
Sounds like people need to speak up to management
Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers
#39Can 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 ac…
The proposed industry solution is to use agents to review PRs, as not to slow down the velocity of delivery... My current workplace is going through a major "realignment" exercise to replace as many testers with agents as humanely possible, which proved to be a challenge when the existing process is not well documented.
So you essentially trust the output of the model from beginning to end? Curious to know what type of application you're building where you can safely do that.
Edit: to clarify, I know these models have gotten significantly better. The output is pretty incredible sometimes, but trusting it end to end like that just seems super risky still.
Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers
#40Can 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 ac…
Maybe it’s time to have multiple agents and models review the PRs and also provide context for easier human review. That and lots more focus on robust testing.
There’s no way velocity will decrease now that upper management is obsessed with AI.