91–100 of 150 posts
Am I the only one that is finding quite the opposite? I feel like a kid again, back when I had no responsibilities and infinite time to play around and build things. Being able to look at my existing tooling and say "there's a rough edge here" and then whip out the equivalent of a Milwaukee Bandfile [1] and smooth it out is making it fun to go to work again.
[1] https://www.milwaukeetool.com/products/details/m12-fuel-1-2-...
There are many projects that should not be built agentically. For things that are appropriate to build with agents, I have come to hold the strong opinion that you need to go all-in. If you built it with an agent, then you fix it with an agent, you debug it with an agent, and you change it with an agent. In that case you should not consider yourself the steward of the source code and worry about “cognitive debt”- it’…
Not my experience at all. I’ve been using Claude Code on a large "hand written" project and it’s genuinely excellent at finding bugs and generating new methods or classes. That said, it still frequently introduces subtle bugs, so I have to review every change carefully. The real trick is learning when to use it. Some tasks are much faster to do myself, while others are faster with Claude Code.
Unfortunately I think Cognitive Debt is the cry of the software craftsperson who thought they were an Engineer. Upon working with the agent subcontractor, the agent factory, the agent part vendor, they approached it as a craft; they found themselves wanting to walk through the offices of the subcontractor reviewing screens, inspect pieces at the factory, and get the internal design for the parts they ordered. It's na…
The post makes some good points. As a programmer I love writing code. I know coding is just a tool but I enjoy the act of thinking about a problem, finding a solution and implementing it. It gives me a little dopamine boost. Ever since LLMs started writing decent code, I started feeling like a part of that joy of code-writing has been taken away. Using LLMs literally leaves a developer to do (what I find is) the wors…
I know older devs that reminisce for the days of programming straight to the metal in assembly (e.g. on DOS or Amiga) and “knowing exactly what the computer is doing” which feels somehow familiar!
Even more familiar are senior devs moving to management (I know this isnt an original metaphor).
Cognitive Debt has existed much earlier before LLMs became mainstream. Technical people got good at their jobs and then was promoted to management. After time they lost their technical abilities but if they are a good manager they kept up to date with the technological landscape and used their engineering thinking to ensure that the people below them worked to their optimum efficiency to achieve the companies goals.…
While this isn't a unique perspective, I think it's wild more people don't understand this. What happened is everyone is being "promoted" to staff+ level engineer and they're realizing the realities of that situation. The funny part is that these are the same people who are upset that these folks up the food chain "do nothing".
> the question becomes how teams will manage cognitive debt That’s the neat trick kiddo, they won’t. Across the industry, the messaging is clear: use AI and be more productive. Management is salivating at the idea of getting rid of people and keeping a higher share of profits for themselves. Most ICs I talk to are increasingly expressing the feeling of burnout, fear of losing jobs and resentment that AI is being push…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are typical LLM voices and styles, just like human writers have differentiated voices and styles. And some common elements of the typical LLM style are distinct from humans I've previously read.
I recognize this. It's also the case that I suspect that I've read more about how annoying suspected LLM output is to read than I have read LLM output. The slop is, to me, an incredibly unwelcome contribution of humans that don't enjoy the craft but complaining about it is equally stuck in and further exacerbating the froth rather than distilling down to the substance. That is it keeps the focus on the surface rather…