91–100 of 105 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still don't understand why coding agents are silo'd, and chat history is treated as disposable. Everyone on the team should be able to see all conversations and drop in and steer agents at any time, and chat history should be part of organizational memory. I thought labs would have pushed collaborative steering by now, but I guess people got so TUI pilled they haven't even considered the possibility.
What will chat history give you that the output of that chat won't?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did AI replace their job, or did the cost of having AI skyrocket so the companies did layoffs to make budget? There’s a difference.
There are plenty of use cases were you can easily replace a person with AI today. AI is very good in creating a working website. We do not have the issue of internet explorer 6 anymore, frontend doesn't host security relevant code and it shouuld also not have the business logic. So its easy to let ai create a website which talks to a secure api endpoint. Plenty of basic android apps are just the same thing: Some API…
I don't have hard data on it, but if someone is spending $1.5k a month on Claude (the limit of some folks I know) that shakes out to $18k a year. In my experience, I'd MUCH rather use the $18k of a few developer's Claude budget to hire another dev instead of trying to get a robot to do stuff.
AI is useful, but it's can't f*cking learn like a human can and improve at something.
And, honestly, if your job can be replaced by AI, then your job was more susceptible to offshoring/layoffs/any other for m of cost cutting already.
This piece is really good: > The cost of building has collapsed, but the cost of aligning organisationally has not. If anything, it's gone up. When three different teams can each produce a working solution to the same problem in the time it used to take to write a proposal, the bottleneck moves from engineering to coordination. We're still figuring out how to productively use coding agents as individuals, the next ch…
I still don't understand why coding agents are silo'd, and chat history is treated as disposable. Everyone on the team should be able to see all conversations and drop in and steer agents at any time, and chat history should be part of organizational memory. I thought labs would have pushed collaborative steering by now, but I guess people got so TUI pilled they haven't even considered the possibility.
I'm sure the labs are working on this sort of thing - Managed Agents are probably the closest?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are plenty of use cases were you can easily replace a person with AI today. AI is very good in creating a working website. We do not have the issue of internet explorer 6 anymore, frontend doesn't host security relevant code and it shouuld also not have the business logic. So its easy to let ai create a website which talks to a secure api endpoint. Plenty of basic android apps are just the same thing: Some API…
The problem with this assertion is cost. You say that if tokens cost a lot of money, you will _have_ to reduce team size. This is a questionable premise and a trap that companies are falling into. I don't have hard data on it, but if someone is spending $1.5k a month on Claude (the limit of some folks I know) that shakes out to $18k a year. In my experience, I'd MUCH rather use the $18k of a few developer's Claude bu…
I would replace that person in a heart beat tbh.
And when I look back, i can list a handful of people of top of my head which I would replace for these tokens too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Traditionally in economics black swan is an unpredictable negative event. The only thing that is unsettled here still is how many more people will lose their jobs and how much cumulative loss prisoner's dilemma will generate. I saw random people on Internet suggesting to piggyback this disaster and dip into the crazy money that it is "generating", but in a zero-sum game somebody has to lose.
As I understand it, it's something unpredictable and high-consequence, not necessarily negative. The origins are in Hume's problem of induction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction
This piece is really good: > The cost of building has collapsed, but the cost of aligning organisationally has not. If anything, it's gone up. When three different teams can each produce a working solution to the same problem in the time it used to take to write a proposal, the bottleneck moves from engineering to coordination. We're still figuring out how to productively use coding agents as individuals, the next ch…
One simple observation is that using agentic AI coding tools is not a multiplayer game currently. It's all one on one. I think this is a problem because a lot of development work actually involves multiple people. And to be effective as a team you need a shared context. If your agent has a different context than mine, we're not working together effectively. Having meetings to work around this is not a great solution. I call them synchronization bottle necks. Because that's what a meeting is. We drop all work to gather in a meeting where we share information and take decisions. And then once we are synced up, we continue work. OSS development happens mostly asynchronous tools. There are no meetings typically and hence less bottlenecks.
But in large organizations, all decision making bogs down on communication overhead. Miscommunication and misaligned people become problematic. The bigger the team the worse it gets. It's an exponential. You end up spending most of your time in meetings where you are collectively blocking each other from getting stuff done. It's why startups are so effective when they are small and agile. With AI we can move at that speed as individuals. But not if we are spending most of our time in meetings trying to brief everyone on all the amazing stuff that happened when you were talking 1 on 1 to your agent. It's a lot of context to dump in a meeting; it obviously does not scale.
The path to a solution might be very simple: why not have agents show up in team chat tools: make this properly multiplayer. Or, better, make the agentic coding tools proper team chat tools. Now we have shared context.
And then maybe rethink the whole process while we're at it. The whole business of having standup meetings is a good example. Or planning meetings. All of that is valuable context for LLMs. So, make sure they are there or at least have access to the transcripts. Use AIs to summarize, provide digests, track issues, update statuses, etc. They are really good at the detail work.
And you could do more radical things: instead of a scrum master, why not have a scrum agent? Why create issues manually? There's a lot of repetitive around issue and backlog management that POs still do manually.
We haven't really scratched the surface of how AIs are going to change development. Some of this probably won't work. Or it will work completely differently. The point is we have yet to try most of this stuff and figure out better ways of working.
If you read between the lines -- and note, the author himself probably did not intend that subtext, or was careful to avoid implying it -- you will realize that the likely natural equilibrium involves way, way less people.
I wrote in more detail in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48040999 -- but the upshot is that in the future teams, or heck entire departments, will be replaced by 1 - 3 very senior ICs that do both strategic and hands-on work.
The driving force for that structure is the high coordination costs or large org, which TFA bemoans quite a few times but does not explicitly call out as THE main issue. I mean, if three teams can provide working solutions in record time, your problem is not aligning them, your problem is that you have two teams too many.
On the bright side, fewer people also means fewer organizational pathologies like bureaucracy, silos, duplication of work, turf-wars, empire building and politics in general. The downside is well, a jobacalypse, starting with juniors (future talent pipeline problem says what?) and middle-management.
This does assume very capable ICs who can do strategic as well as tactical hands-on work. This is where future job seekers want to be. They will be worth their weight in gold. Which will still be wayyyyyy less than the value they provide (or crudely, the salaries of the teams they replace.) They'll do 5x the work but won't get paid 5x as much, of course. what do you think this is, socialism?
[flagged]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
that is just simply wrong
What is wrong? I do not mind at all that someone creates an AI Image to decorate a blog article. I'm also not directly offended if someone is using an LLM to write text. And i find it a valid argument, that people who post on HN and get enough votes for content, people read and liked, that this can be enough as a filter or quality gate.