Funny enough, I think github and communication are still a huge part of what I see.

Github code itself maybe irrelevant, but is the product KISS/UNIX? Or is it an demonstration of complete lack of discipline about what "feature" should be added. If you see something that have multiple weakly or completely irrelevant feature strung together, it's saying something. Additionally, AI would often create speghetti structures, and require human shepherding to ensure the structure remain sound.

Same with communication. I have AI smell, I know if something is AI slop. In my current job, docs sent with expectation for others to read always prefaced with -- this section typed 100% by aperocky -- and I dispensed with grammar and spelling checks for added authenticity. I'll then add -- following section is AI generated -- to mark the end of my personal writing.

I think that is the way to go in the future. I pass intentional thinking into AI, not the other way around. There are knowledge flowing back for sure, but only humans possess intention, at least for now.

Those things are all still signals. If taken from a snapshot of the Internet pre-AI.

> But now that signal is even more rubbish. Even readmes and blog posts are becoming worse signals since they don't necessarily showcase your own communication skills anymore nor how you think about problems.

Yup. I've spotted former coworkers who I know for a fact can barely write in their native language, let alone in English, working for AWS and writing English-language technical blog posts in full AI-ese. Full of the usual "it's not X, it's Y", full of AI-slop. Most of the text is filler, with a few tidbits of real content here and there.

I don't know before, but now blog posts have become more noise than signal.

Anecdotally I've been observing a significant uptick in the amount of code being produced by my peers who are in senior engineer, leadership and engineering management positions.

They can take their 20+ years of experience and use it to build working systems in the gaps between meetings now. Previously they would have to carve out at least half a day of uninterrupted time to get something meaningful done.

If the team does the exact same thing, not very long.

The ability to know what to build and what not to build is going to be as important as knowing how to build it. I still think engineers have an edge here. All my childhood dreams of what I should be able to do or build are coming to a reality and the only thing that is blocking me is lack of time. I want to go faster still

When I was in automation a decade ago, they keep telling us to never tell people this is going to replace them. What you tell them is it will allow their teams to finally focus on what really matters. Instead of working on all these repetitive tasks, now they can focus on the much larger issues. Everybody bought in, teams felt like the automation we were doing was really going to make their jobs easier.

It never did.

Managers realized they could trim their teams down after we were done and did in fact, layoff people by the hundreds. Doing the same work with less people was beneficial to them because now they got bigger bonuses and salary increases for adding to the bottom line of the company. Many managers who did nothing more than layoff half their team were promoted faster up the ranks.

So yes, be scared, be VERY scared and have a Plan B and a Plan C going forward. The people who created this have rose colored glasses on how its going to revolutionize business. The actual businesses owners and CEO's just a see another new way to reduce human capital in order to increase profits.

> How long do you think it'll take for the AI trend to mostly automate the parts of your job that still make you excited?

Yeah, no one ever thinks beyond "whoa, how cool, I cloned Slack in 15 minutes!"

Personally, the thing I find more depressing is turning a career that was primarily about solving interesting puzzles in elegant ways into managing a swarm of idiot savant chatbots with "OK, that looks good" or "no, do it better" commands.

> How long do you think it'll take for the AI trend to mostly automate the parts of your job that still make you excited?

The exciting part of the job is, and always has been, listening to idle chitchat where you pick up on the subtle cues of where one is finding difficulty in their life and then solving those problems. I think AI could already largely handle that today just fine, except:

You have to convince, especially non-technical, people to have idle chitchat with machines instead of humans

-or-

Convince them of and into having a machine always listening in to their idle conversations with humans

Neither of those are all that palatable in the current social landscape. If anything, people seem to be growing more weary of letting technology into their thoughts. Maybe there is never a future where humans become accepting of machines being always there trying to figure out what is wrong with them.

The trouble with AI replacing jobs is that a lot of jobs exist only because people want to have other people to talk to and are willing to pay for the company.

As someone in 99th percentile in terms of token usage, it's super clear to me where the agent will not be able to replace my judgement, two areas:

1. if it exceed the context the agent does random stuff, that are often against simplicity and coherent logical structure.

2. LLM has zero intention, and rely on you to decide what to build and more importantly not build.

As such, I'm the limit of the numbers of concurrent agents working fo rme, because there is still a limit to my output of engineering judgement. I do get better, both at generating and delivering this judgement. Exceeding this limit, the output becomes garbage.

At this current year and date, the AI does not automate me in anyway, I have something that they just flat out don't have.