Yep. Most knowledge work is about coordination between people and transporting the right information to the people that are thinking and the people that are doing (not always separate groups, but can be one group switching mode). You need people because there's a lot of shared context between individuals in society that is not encoded anywhere.

Exactly right.

I have an idea for an “evidence editor.” Claude is waiting for me to tell it exactly what I want this thing to be. But I don’t know. I haven’t figured out how to square the various circles, even in my fantasies. Until I do, Claude sits and waits. And waits…

Bad code is bad code, doesn't matter how it was generated.

I didn't say anything about increased productivity or 10x. Feel free to revise your strawman.

10x is definitely possible at a startup level. I suppose not in a big tech world (seems obvious to me, and it's not like development speed was the bottleneck there either, right?)

You can choose not to believe what I say (and I genuinely understand if you do), and I can simply keep on doing it. I'm not taking it out of thin air either. tuesday I did in 8h the work I scheduled for roughly 65h. Ok, so maybe it's not 10x, maybe it's 8x, same ball park.

And that's only talking about development. If I now get into other aspects....I have just spent the last 1.5 hours creating an incredibly detailed backcatalog of tasks and epics. This is the most detailed I have ever done so in my life and it has been working very well. It's like we merged the good of highly-detailed waterfall with the speed of agile.

Tee-hee: Watergile. (I'm sure some expert in the field will let me know I have coined a new term for something that very much has a name; excuse my ignorance in advance).

Nonetheless, I did this all by talking to the computer which is interfacing with my project management tools, the project documentation, and the project code. Full context on everything. In the past, I would have taken 3 or 4 days to create the same amount of tasks with a vaguely similar amount of detail. But, in truth, I wouldn't have spent so much time putting this love into the craft (!!) of planning a project, because it would exhaust me and feel like a waste of time.

Don't get me wrong, I totally see shit code being thrown everywhere by inferior AI models or people who can't tame the beasts, but the right people in my life are _clearly_ building out more, better tested code, and actually built with more care. Maybe it's not at the line-by-line level, but it certainly is from the end-product result (thinking of the actual end-user). I accept your mileage may vary -- this is my very personal experience.

Maybe it'll stop happening, who knows. Maybe price will be prohibitive, or maybe we'll have such an avalanche of ideas that weren't worth building that everyone will be overwhelmed and take a step back. Or maybe we won't develop juniors into the seniors of tomorrow. Or maybe everything will indeed implode once products are large enough that the original development speed can't be maintained anymore and expectations are mismatched.

What I do know is that it is definitely happening in my world, and I haven't had this much fun since I was a little kid learning to code.

Want something to be terrified of?

I work at a massive health care company. They're 100% on the AI bandwagon and are putting AI everywhere they can. Billing, Software, DevOps, everywhere. If you think you can give an Agent some information and have go to work for some user, its 100% on the table for the company to do and either a) then outsource the rest offshore or b) lay the person off or shrink the department to increase the bottom line.

Your healthcare, right now, is being offloaded to AI agents and bots and this is only the beginning.

>lots of places, including plenty of startups and fast-moving companies are staying off of this trend.

Provide some examples then? Everyone who is all in on agentic code are pretty vocal about it. Who is declaring the opposite stance? Anyone?

Indeed, I feel this place has gone insane. There's no balance here.

You've got boosters and then you've got people who are panicking/fighting against anything pro-AI.

It is not just startups or small companies embracing agentic engineering… Stripe published blog posts about their autonomous coding agents. Amazon is blowing up production because they gave their agents access to prod. Google and Microsoft develop their own agentic engineering tools. It’s not just tech companies either, massive companies are frequently announcing their partnerships with OpenAI or Anthropic.

You can’t just pretend it’s startups doing all the agentic engineering. They’re just the ones pushing the boundaries on best practices the most aggressively.

>Outwards communication and inside results tend to differ vastly.

This is a good call out, but I'm talking to a lot of friends at other companies. So my perspective is informed by both news and personal anecdote.

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