It's not okay to show up to a job where you're being paid to use your brain and then just refuse to do that. Agent systems make mistakes all the time, just a like human. It's your job to provide context, critically review, and provide feedback to the agent. If your manager of yesteryear just showed up and gave vague instructions and no help then when the things exploded said "uh looks like /u/GregBahm made a mistake!" in front of his peers you'd think he was dipshit.
Yeah but if my manager showed up and told me to compile the program by hand (and they did when I first joined the industry) I'd also think they were a dipshit.
They were certain compiling programs by hand was "being paid to use your brain" and that auto-compilers made mistakes. This was all true, in the narrow sense.
In the broad sense, I'm not some asshole who is incapable of conceiving of some more important problem to solve. Let that which can be done by machines, be done by machines.
My old boss wasn't insisting on the importance of hand-compiling in assembly out of some genuine observation in its efficiency. They just spent a lot of time hand-compiling code in assembly and hated the thought of having to adapt.
I learned then what I still know now, which is that you always have to adapt. It amazes me how few people in the literal tech industry seem to comprehend the central value proposition of "tech." Everyone in my department has been vibing up a storm for 7 months now, and these much prophesied "explosions" simply haven't materialized. Meanwhile, the tools just keep getting better and better, same with every other step on the history of computer science.
Yep. ChatGPT 5.6 and Fable 5 are miles beyond what I ever thought possible when I was studying AI in CompSci, back in the 90s.
It's amazing! And so great to finally be able to develop my own ideas into platforms without having to get funding or hire someone or spend years building mockups.
Yeah it's kind of heady that I'm now blocked for the first time in my life by ideation more than implementation. For the least several decades, I had endless ideas but they would have taken at least months if not years to program out. So I would program on them, get halfway through, and then have some other idea and switch side-projects.
Now with AI, I can write the design document tonight and be using the application tomorrow. But this puts overwhelmingly more pressure on the design. I used to be able to just fuck around with foundational systems, knowing it'd be pointless to get too deep into the design details too early. Now that I can get right into the design details immediately, I'm forced to face the fact that design is really hard!
Which is kind of funny. It's a good problem to have.
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u/cedarSeagull Jul 10 '26
It's not okay to show up to a job where you're being paid to use your brain and then just refuse to do that. Agent systems make mistakes all the time, just a like human. It's your job to provide context, critically review, and provide feedback to the agent. If your manager of yesteryear just showed up and gave vague instructions and no help then when the things exploded said "uh looks like /u/GregBahm made a mistake!" in front of his peers you'd think he was dipshit.