I also wouldn't be surprised if bean counters were expecting a return in an unreasonable amount of time.

"Hey, guys, listen, I know that this just completely torched decades of best practices in your field, but if you can't show me progress in a fiscal year, I have to turn it down." - some MBA somewhere, probably, trying and failing yet again to rub his two brain cells together for the first time since high school.

Just agentic coding is a huge change. Like a years-to-grasp change, and the very nature of the changes that need to be made keep changing.

"Actually its good we aren't making money, this actually proves how revolutionary the technology is. You really need to think about adapting to our new timeline."

You really set yourself up with a nice glass house trying to make fun of the money guys when you are essentially just moving your own goal posts. It was annoying two (or three?) years ago when we were all talking about replacing doctors and lawyers, now it just cant help but feel like a parody of itself in some small way.

> Just agentic coding is a huge change

I've been programming professionally for > 20 years and I intend to do it for another > 20 years. The tools available have evolved continually, and will continue to do so. Keeping abreast of that evolution is an important part of the job. But the essential nature of the role has not changed and I don't expect it to do so. Gen AI is a tool, one that so far to me feels very much like IDE tooling (autocomplete, live diagnostics, source navigation): something that's nice to have, that's probably worth the time, and maybe worth the money, to set up, but which I can easily get by without and experience very little disadvantage.

I can't see the future any more than anyone else, but I don't expect the capabilities and limitations of LLMs to change materially and I don't expect to be left in the dust by people who've learned to wrangle wonders from them by dark magics. I certainly don't think they've "torched decades of best practice in my field". I expect them to improve as tools and, as they do, I may find myself using them more as I go about my job, continuing to apply all of the other skills I've learned over the years.

And yes, I do have an eye-wateringly expensive Claude subscription and have beheld the wonders of Opus 4. I've used Claude Code and worked around its shitty error handling [1]. I've seen it one-shot useful programs from brief prompts, programs I've subsequently used for real. It has saved me non-zero amounts of time - actual, measurable time, which I've spent doodling, making tea and thinking. It's extremely impressive, it's genuinely useful, it's something I would have thought impossible a few years ago and it changes none of the above.

[1] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/473

Sam Altman and company have been promising full on AGI. THAT'S the price shock.

Agents may be good (I haven't seen it yet, maybe it's a skill issue but I'm not spending hundreds of dollars to find out and my company seems reluctant to spend thousands to find out) but they are definitely, definitely not general superintelligence like SamA has been promising

at all

really is sinking in

these might be useful tools, yes, but the market was sold science fiction. We have a useful supercharged autocomplete sold as goddamn positronic brains. The commentariat here perhaps understood that (definitely not everyone) but it's no surprise that there's a correction now that GPT-5 isn't literally smarter than 95% of the population when that's how it was being marketed

> "Hey, guys, listen, I know that this just completely torched decades of best practices in your field, but if you can't show me progress in a fiscal year, I have to turn it down."

I mean, this is basically how all R&D works, everywhere, minus the strawman bit about "single fiscal year", which isn't functionally true.

And this is a serious career tip: you need to get good at this. Being able to break down extremely ambitious, many-year projects into discrete chunks that prove progress and value is a fundamental skill to being able to do big things.

If a group of very smart people said "give us ${BILLIONS} and don't bother us for 15 years while we cook up the next world-shaking thing", the correct response to that is "no thanks". Not because we hate innovation, but because there's no way to tell the geniuses apart from the cranks, and there's not even a way to tell the geniuses-pursuing-dead-ends from the geniuses-pursuing-real-progress.

If you do want to have billions and 15 years to invent the next big thing, you need to be able to break the project up to milestones where each one represents convincing evidence that you're on the right track. It doesn't have to be on an annual basis, but it needs to be on some cadence.

Agreed agentic coding is a huge change. Smart startups will be flying but aren't representative. Big companies won't change because the staff will just spend more time shopping online instead of doing more than what is asked of them. Maybe increased retail spend is a better measure of AI efficacy.