- spending exorbitant amounts of time up front planning, surfacing every milestone, subtask, and individual change, burning tons of tokens in addition to man hours fixing minute but important mistakes or derivations despite explicit instructions, CLAUDE.md, memory subsystems, agent and skill instructions, etc.
- executing and reviewing results compared to the plan and finding even more mistakes and derivations from the plan often takes a lot of time
- the relative rapidity produces a lot of output for the team which stresses our lifecycle and introduces feelings the whole process is on the verge of flying off the rails
- individual developers have different expectations, definitions of acceptable, skills/experience to detect and deal with problems, and patience. I might spend hours to days meticulously planning and executing a ticket and another guy might yolo it in 30 minutes. Other than bug escape rate and tracking review failures I’m struggling with how to track people who are “doing it wrong” let alone telling them the “right” way to do it.
- growing exhaustion, lack of ownership and confidence, frustration, and a generalized feeling of endlessly fighting your tools but in a weird way they never seem to really improve despite all your efforts to do so
- taking humans out of the loop and letting the agents be more autonomous in hopes that we’ll reduce the bottleneck and produce better results has not helped.
- I find even myself fighting (and sometimes failing) the urge to give in even though the proposed or implemented solution doesn’t feel right. Scale that across your team
- experience has not really changed despite changes in models and harnesses
- there’s a deep feeling that I’m doing something wrong and fomo since so many people in the industry boast of incredible results. I probably am, but everything I’ve read about and tried has not really moved the needle much and it’s introducing another dimension of exhaustion and frustration
overall, I don’t feel like we’re being much more productive when you factor in quality and accountability (which should be a given, but this industry increasingly overtaken by a reckless philosophy of speed over everything else). I do think it has helped parallelize tasks, produce higher quality PoCs to explore more options and do it faster, offload joyless but necessary tasks that are narrow in scope and measurable, do exploratory work and act as a generalized interactive knowledge base, and make shallow techniques, technologies, etc. that you don’t yet have experience with. Maybe I’m just missing a critical component or two in the process (formal specification, etc). Maybe it’s growing pains, or maybe there’s a looming rot. Either way job satisfaction and confidence in my work is much lower than I would have expected.
I recently got a task to sift through a daily drop of parquet files that need to be processed and given a UI for arbitrary queries by a non-technical team. Naively I started by looking at redshift, Athena/glue, etc. I spun my wheels for a week and barely made progress, resulting in a miserably fragile, slow, overly complicated, and/or expensive set of underwhelming PoCs. So I decided to give DuckDB a shot and I got the whole project done in under a day. It was so intuitive and runs so fast I was sure I was missing something. I wasn’t. What an absolute joy to use, and the supporting documentation is outstanding. My problem now is it’s my favorite hammer and I want everything to be a nail.
I was in the Boy Scouts and a lot of it was appealing at first, but it eventually became ugly to me. I loved the aspects that focused on nature, exploration, self-reliance, and to a degree the quasi-military sense of duty, brotherhood, structure, and (at least the illusion) of support which I craved. As I got older though, I became impatient if not infuriated with the organization’s preoccupation with dogma, ideological loyalty, and increasing focus on establishing in and out groups. The leaders and scouts that flourished where rigid top down authoritarian types that epitomized what I grew to strongly dislike about the rest of American patriarchal society that I was increasingly struggling with in day to day life: bullying, hypocrisy, cruelty, and fearful of anything that doesn’t conform to an embarrassingly narrow and ignorant standard. Of course, I understood that it perhaps said more about the fact a lot of dads in my community were assholes, but organizationally it seemed to reward those sorts of people and shit all over everyone else. I just wanted to camp and respect nature, not join the Hitler Youth and get bullied more. I was/am annoyed by people being surprised by the BSA’s problems with abuse, as logically and historically these sorts of institutions are fertile ground for abuse.
While we’re adding antiquated and shitty ways to interface with your agent, can we add fax support? Maybe direct-to-mail service for postcards and flyers?
Has this changed recently? I started playing at launch, and while initially it was a lot of fun and I had predominantly positive experiences, after a couple of weeks I quit because it devolved into little more than griefing. I don’t mind it getting a little sweaty here and there but I don’t have time for nonstop edgelords going lord of the flies in front of their 3 twitch viewers.
Even before AI, writing software isn’t even the “hardest” part. This is new enough that I wouldn’t be waving Mission Accomplished flags just because someone was able to dump out a react front end, wire up some managed services, and get paying users. Let’s see how this pans out long term when someone grapples with cost, reliability, security, growth, competition, and all the other actually hard parts. Also, using “I’ve heard this all before” and pointing to cloud, mobile, whatever as the basis of your argument is a bit awkward… yeah a lot of folks made a shit ton of money but the current tech landscape is increasingly a wasteland of broken and harmful things. I’m not sure I’m thrilled that we invented a machine to accelerate decline.
But the underlying point, I think, is that the right tool in the right hands is an extraordinary thing, especially when you bring execution closer to smart visionaries who aren’t otherwise technical. I can’t sit here in denial that LLMs have drastically changed things to that effect, whether I like it or not.
I’m learning Japanese, which is overall a difficult language for a native English speaker to learn. However, the rules for pronunciation are comparatively a big relief, as is hiragana/katakana
This writing style where every section has multiple paragraphs of preamble, prolepsis, cold openers for cold openers, and tangents is infuriating. Get on to the point already.
Suggesting that the wholesale suffering wrought by humanity unto itself and all other life on this planet throughout its entire history is merely in my mind or a problem with my personal life is actually incredibly insulting on top of being willfully ignorant.
My first serious programming job was at a start up and the owner asked me this question. I was caught off guard, of course I wouldn’t! I couldn’t really explain why at the time, but it essentially revolved around the fact that I was young and optimistic. 25 years later, I’m not so sure. Now, said optimism has almost vanished and there are days pushing seems like the path to least suffering, but I also feel it’s unethical for one person to decide for everyone else.