Cursor absolutely tries to maximize what they claim is "AI-edited" and it's nonsense a lot of the time. If it writes a function and then I got in and edit that function, it claims my edits _and_ any net-new lines I add above or below the function.

you don't use vim/emacs for the productivity. It's a lifestyle decision

It's not required for startups. But if you are building trashy, brittle products and your main metric is speed to market, and have the expectation of high failure chances (e.g. most yc startup batches) - then yes you have to do agentic eng.

If you are making extremely specific, high quality products over a long time window and your founders are deeply experienced in that field of engineering, then no, you don't need agentic engineering and probably want very little llm code in general (outside of some boilerplate, internal toolings, etc).

> I still don't know how to reconcile these reports

This is work related. So you can't expect everyone to have the same input demands or output expectations.

> Probably there is no dichotomy

It's literally staring you in the face.

I think GenAI-agentic assisted engineering is the only way of working nowadays, and it's the only way I personally have worked for months. I still think that an outright majority of presentations on AI tooling I've seen have been in the nonsensical "Look how many tokens I can burn" genre. Had to sit through one guy recently who explained why you need a complex agentic team with 6 different roles in order to ask Claude to investigate a bug, which you most definitely do not.

Wage workers are evaluated on behaviors, founders are evaluated on growth and revenue. Of course usage patterns and outcomes will be different

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Not even joking that the main benefit I've seen from "AI" for editing code is that it lets me quickly do all the things I could already have been doing just as quickly if I'd ever bothered to learn to use my tools.

Of course I lose about as much time as I save to its fuck-ups, so I'd still have been better off learning to actually use a text editor properly. Though (as I mentioned in a another post) part of why I've never done that in 25ish years of writing code for pay is that my code-writing speed has never been too slow for any of the businesses I've worked in, i.e. other things move slowly enough it never mattered.

Once I learn a command that is both repeatable and useful, I prefer to either keep it in my mind or in my aliases. Thank you.

Is it? If the LLMs change broke something do you know enough to fix it?

> You dont need to know that command anymore

I find it hard to read "You can do things without knowing things" as a positive improvement in work, society, life, anywhere

Look, I feel for junior admins, I was one 35 years ago and the only reason I'm where I am today was because I had to learn the hard way, repeatedly and often.

I use the shit out of opencode to do things as a force multiplier, not as a way to keep me from knowing what its doing.

The point at which we're optimizing for "we don't need to know that anymore" is the point at which everything blows up, because agentic work is not fully deterministic, models hallucinate even simple things.

Blindly relying on your agent weapon of choice to just do the right thing because you didn't take the time to understand how the lego fits together is an actual problem.

I watched people ask LLMs for linting/refactoring help, burning easily 5 minutes for something that could be completed deterministically, locally, in ms using any modern editor.

Quite frankly it was embrassing. We've had tools for static analysis for ages. Use them.

Someone with better knowledge could work 100x faster using 100x fewer resources. They did it the slow, expensive way but at least didn't have to think? Odd flex.

It's also several hundred times more expensive.

I can't tell if this comment is sarcasm or not. If you let AI run commands you don't understand (especially in production) you may end up with some nasty surprises.