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Grief and the AI split

blog.lmorchard.com

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Re: Grief and the AI split

#41

Post by CharlieDigital »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #37
CharlieDigital wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have human reviews on every PR. Quality and consistency are going up , not down. Partially because the agents follow the guidance much more closely than humans do and there is far less variance. Shortcuts that a human would make ("I'll just write a one-off here"), the agent does not...so long as our rules guide it properly ("Let me find existing patterns in the codebase."). Part of it is the investment in docs we'…

> Partially because the agents follow the guidance much more closely than humans do and there is far less variance. Ouch. Managing human coders has been described as herding cats (with some justice). Getting humans to follow standards is... challenging. And exhausting. Getting AIs to do so... if you get the rules right, and if the tool doesn't ignore the rules, then you should be good. And if you're not, you still ha…

Yes, as I mentioned in my other replies, what I've seen is that quality has gone up and coalesced around a much higher bar with far less variance than before as we've refined our docs and tooling.

In some cases, it was "instant"; dev's MCP server connected to our docs was down -> terrible PR. We fix the MCP connection and redo the PR -> instantly follows the guides we have in place for best practices.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#42

Post by gassi »

PaulHoule wrote: post #23

You can use gen AI entirely in the spirit of craft. For instance if you need to consume, implement or extend some open source software you can load it up in an agent IDE and ask “How do I?” questions or “how is it that?” questions that put you on a firm footing.

And contribute your changes back upstream, right?

Re: Grief and the AI split

#44

Post by blobbers »

Pointy haired bosses be looking for results.

Engineers be loving the craft.

It's a dance, but AI is unfortunately looking at us like we're dancing, and meanwhile it's built a factory.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#45

Post by adriand »

simonw wrote: post #2

This sounds right to me: > Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day. Writing code by hand. Using the same editors, the same languages, the same pull request workflows. The craft-lovers and the make-it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable. The motivation behind the work was invisible because the process was identical. Helps explain why some people are d…

I feel zero sense of sadness about how things used to be. I feel like the change that sucked the most was when software engineering went from something that nerds did because they were passionate about programming, to techbros who were just in it for the money. We lost the idealism of the web a long time ago and the current swamp with apex reptiles like Zuckerberg is what we have now. It became all about the bottom line a long time ago.

The two emotions I personally feel are fear and excitement. Fear that the machines will soon replace me. Excitement about the things I can build now and the opportunities I’m racing towards. I can’t say it’s the most enjoyable experience. The combo is hellish on sleep. But the excitement balances things out a bit.

Maybe I’d feel a sense of sadness if I didn’t feel such urgency to try and ride this tsunami instead of being totally swept away by it.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#46

Post by RayVR »

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…

These bear related sayings always make me laugh. The one I was told by a Russian: “don’t argue over how to skin the bear before you’ve killed it”

Re: Grief and the AI split

#47

Post by techpression »

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.

Outwards communication and inside results tend to differ vastly. I’ve heard some true horror stories already from companies who claim they’re doing amazing things with great results. You should be especially on guard if it’s a publicly traded company, selling AI usage is necessary to appease the market (and thereby C-level stock value).

Re: Grief and the AI split

#48

Post by operatingthetan »

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.

>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?

Re: Grief and the AI split

#49

Post by operatingthetan »

techpression wrote: post #47
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.

Outwards communication and inside results tend to differ vastly. I’ve heard some true horror stories already from companies who claim they’re doing amazing things with great results. You should be especially on guard if it’s a publicly traded company, selling AI usage is necessary to appease the market (and thereby C-level stock value).

>Outwards communication and inside results tend to differ vastly.

This is a good call out, but I'm talking to a lot of friends at other companies. So my perspective is informed by both news and personal anecdote.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#50

Post by torben-friis »

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.

Just out of the popularity of the claim, I’ll bite.

Both big tech and startups are now full of people working at 10x, features are written as fast as PMs can think them, monoliths self heal with agents buzzing over them.

10x means 10 times the outcomes in a given amount of time, so did you see the last iOS version pack a decade worth of features in a single release?

Do you remember when meta moved their backend to rust in a month?

What about Microsoft software not having a single bug in a year?

Yeah, me neither.

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