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Grief and the AI split

blog.lmorchard.com

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Re: Grief and the AI split

#51

Post by sublinear »

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…

The divide was never invisible and there has always been at least three camps.

The "make-it-go" people couldn't make anything go back then either. They build ridiculous unmaintainable code with or without AI. Since they are cowboys that don't know what they're doing, they play the blame game and kiss a ton of ass.

The "craft-lovers" got in the way just as much with their endless yak shaving. They now embrace AI because they were just using "craft" as an excuse for why they didn't know what they were doing. They might be slightly more productive now only because they can argue with themselves instead of the rest of the team.

The more experienced and pragmatic people have always been forced to pick up the slack. If they have a say, they will keep scope narrow for the other two groups so they don't cause much damage. Their use of AI is largely limited to google searches like it always was.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#53

Post by hungryhobbit »

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 strongly disagree. There's always been two camps ... on everything!

Emacs vs. vi. Command-line editor vs. IDE. IntelliJ vs. VS Code. I could do like twenty more of these: dev teams have always split on technology choices.

But, all of those were rational separations. Emacs and vi, IntelliJ and VS Code ... they're all viable options, so they boil down to subjective preference. By definition, anything subjective will vary between different humans.

What makes AI different to me is the fear. Nobody decided not to use emacs because they were afraid it was going to take their job ... but a huge portion of the anti-AI crowd is motivated by irrational fear, related to that concern.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#54

Post by techpression »

operatingthetan wrote: post #49
techpression wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, it goes both ways, I’m having great results at the startup I’m working at too.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#55

Post by sothatsit »

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.

It is not just startups or small companies embracing agentic engineering… Stripe published blog posts about their autonomous coding agents. Amazon is blowing up production because they gave their agents access to prod. Google and Microsoft develop their own agentic engineering tools. It’s not just tech companies either, massive companies are frequently announcing their partnerships with OpenAI or Anthropic.

You can’t just pretend it’s startups doing all the agentic engineering. They’re just the ones pushing the boundaries on best practices the most aggressively.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#56

Post by Roguelazer »

The important thing to remember is that for a large number of people (in the US), "work" is a place where they do things that they hate for eight hours a day, for people they hate (surveys routinely show between 40% and 60% of people are "satisfied" with their jobs). Those of us who are in the tech industry because we like actually programming computers (the "craft-lovers", in the parlance of this blog post) have been lucky enough to have jobs where where we get to actually do something we enjoy (even if it's intermingled with meetings and JIRA). If AI slop really is the future and programming becomes as rare of a job as hand-building wood furniture, then most of us are going to be living the normal experience of capitalism in a way that we are probably not well-prepared for.

Personally, I have noticed that I still produce substantially more and better code than the people at my company spending all day writing prompts, so I'm not too worried yet, but it seems plausible at some point that a machine that stole every piece of software ever written will be able to reliably turn a few hundred watt-hours of of electricity into a hallucination-free PR.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#57

Post by operatingthetan »

torben-friis wrote: post #50
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.

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 ru…

I didn't say anything about increased productivity or 10x. Feel free to revise your strawman.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#58

Post by [deleted] »

torben-friis wrote: post #50
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.

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 ru…

[deleted]

Re: Grief and the AI split

#59

Post by ehnto »

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…

It's not a pure dichotomy though. I have always been both, and slowly mixing in agentic coding for work has left me some new headspace to do "trad" programming on side projects at home.

I love the exciting ideation phase, I love putting together the puzzle that makes the product work, and I also take pride in the craft.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#60

Post by LPisGood »

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…

> 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.

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