This reminds me of a nightmare I had in college one semester when I was taking 18 credit hours and consulting part time.
I'd been up for days and had been cramming for a computer architecture exam when I basically passed out.
I had this very visceral nightmare where I was a compiler and the C code was coming faster than I could translate to ASM. I kept trying to escape but it was like I was locked into the work in this never-ending grinding cycle I couldn't escape from. The dream went on for what felt like hours until I woke up drenched in sweat.
Hopefully these neurons aren't satisfying whatever sufficiency threshold delimits consciousness. Approaching some weird ethical territory in any case for sure.
I think a lot of people have projects like this going at the moment, but I'm working on a deterministic (i.e. code / data persistence) layer that sits between agents and helps orchestrate their work.
Basically an API wrapping a cyclic graph where rules govern the state transitions / graph traversal (i.e. rules around handing off work between agents and the associated review, rollback and human intervention escalation logic).
It's mostly just to teach myself about multiagent patterns and what blend of "agentic autonomy" and deterministic / human governance gets the best results with the current set of (Anthropic) tools available.
I don't really know what I'm doing w.r.t AI, but having 15 years of industry SWE experience (high-availability distributed systems and full-stack web dev) on top of a fairly-solid CS education I feel like I know what the results of a working system should be and I'm learning a lot about the AI pieces as I go through trial and error.
Generally it feels like there are lots of ways the next generation of AI-assisted coding workflows could work best (beyond just "AI helps write code", I mean) and the results will be as much about the tooling built around the AI bits as it will be the improvements in models / AI bits themselves (barring a theoretical breakthrough in the space).
Trying to figure out what my personal dev workflow will look like in the middle of this evolving landscape is what led to this project, very much a scratch my own itch thing.
I hate it, but I'm actually counting on this and how it affects my future earning potential as part of my early(ish) retirement plan!
I do use them, and I also still do some personal projects and such by hand to stay sharp.
Just: they can't mint any more "pre-AI" computer scientists.
A few outliers might get it and bang their head on problems the old way (which is what, IMO, yields the problem-solving skills that actually matter) but between:
* Not being able to mint any more "pre-AI" junior hires
And, even if we could:
* Great migration / Covid era overhiring and the corrective layoffs -> hiring freezes and few open junior reqs
* Either AI or executives' misunderstandings of it and/or use of it as cover for "optimization" - combined with the Nth wave of offshoring we're in at the moment -> US hiring freezes and few open junior reqs
* Jobs and tasks junior hires used to cut their teeth on to learn systems, processes, etc. being automated by AI / RPA -> "don't need junior engineers"
The upstream "junior" source for talent our industry needs has been crippled both quantitatively and qualitatively.
We're a few years away from a _massive_ talent crunch IMO. My bank account can't wait!
Yes, yes. It's analogous to our wizzardly greybeard ancestors prophesying that youngsters' inability to write ASM and compile it in their heads would bring end of days, or insert your similar story from the 90s or 2000s here (or printing press, or whatever).
Order of "dumbing down" effect in a space that one way or another always eventually demands the sort of functional intelligence that only rigorous, hard work on hard problems can yield feels completely different, though?
I'd been up for days and had been cramming for a computer architecture exam when I basically passed out.
I had this very visceral nightmare where I was a compiler and the C code was coming faster than I could translate to ASM. I kept trying to escape but it was like I was locked into the work in this never-ending grinding cycle I couldn't escape from. The dream went on for what felt like hours until I woke up drenched in sweat.
Hopefully these neurons aren't satisfying whatever sufficiency threshold delimits consciousness. Approaching some weird ethical territory in any case for sure.