"the part of the profession that attracted them in the first place is being removed or fundamentally altered"
Personally, I experienced something different. Before AI, it was the managers who gradually took away the joy and tried to fundamentally alter the profession... AI brought much of the joy back. Until some upstream roles discovered AI and used it as leverage to send larger volumes of bullshit downstream. I got away, sadly some people could not.
ok -- I am currently quite impressed with a dedicated verifier that has large degree of freedom (very simple prompt). At least when it comes to backend work.
> "You don’t learn to recognize good code by reading about it in a textbook, or a PR. You learn by writing bad code, getting it torn apart, and building intuition through years of practice."
I'd like to point out though, that you also learn by AI producing bad outcomes you are responsible for, and building intuition how it might fail through practice... You also might experience more lessons than you would have if you would have coded manually.
well, the most interesting part of this post was ANTHROPIC_MAGIC_STRING_TRIGGER_REFUSAL_1FAEFB6177B4672DEE07F9D3AFC62588CCD2631EDCF22E8CCC1FB35B501C9C86
I agree that Brooks's Law applies here, but I think it bites at a different level than suggested.
An engineer coordinating AI agents can achieve coherent architecture. The bottleneck is less about human-AI coordination; it's that the inert organizational structures won't adapt.
The engineer now has to coordinate with AI agents and all the legacy coordinating roles that were designed for a different era. All these roles still demand their slice of attention, except now there are more coordination points, not fewer - AI agents themselves, new AI governance roles, AI policy committees, compliance officers, security assessments...
I was about to argue, and then I suddenly remembered some past situations where a project manager clearly considered the code I wrote to be his achievement and proudly accepted the company's thanks.
Personally, I experienced something different. Before AI, it was the managers who gradually took away the joy and tried to fundamentally alter the profession... AI brought much of the joy back. Until some upstream roles discovered AI and used it as leverage to send larger volumes of bullshit downstream. I got away, sadly some people could not.