>Writing code by hand will always be around for bespoke and novel, complex work.

That sentence is probably the key.

There is zero chance of this stopping overall.

Much like with artists 90% of the commercial stuff - copy/ads with generic guy in suit picture - will be AI that is "good enough".

Less concerned about the code quality and more the labour market dynamics. If this goes anything like translation & creative space did then there is going to be a brutal shakeup where competition for remaining "real" seats gets intense

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bitexploder 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We now have more work, not less. Engineers can finally address security and tech debt! Surely businesses will see the value in that. Right?

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KronisLV an hour ago | parent [-]

> Engineers can finally address security and tech debt!

I’ve been gradually moving test coverage up, updating packages with CVEs (even if in some cases it’s more like a migration), fixing more bugs, writing load testing solutions, fixing badly made architectural choices and recently even migrated a codebase away from Oracle onto PostgreSQL and figured out some pretty good settings for the DB itself with the aforementioned test tool. Oh and introduced Testcontainers to actually do proper DB tests.

None of this would have happened without agents that churn even while I sleep, but somehow that is still more work cause I have to iterate on their output a lot and come up with additional ProjectLint rules whenever something new comes up. It’s like burnout². Obviously I also bear the blame when the slop inevitably goes wrong despite efforts to keep it manageable, so maybe touching nothing would be better.

	▲	bitexploder an hour ago \| parent [-]
		That is what I have learned over the last year. I still only have so much mental bandwidth. I can definitely do more now, but I have become relatively disciplined about what I nudge along each week with agents and it's okay if it doesn't happen in 2 days or 3 days. The efficiency gains are there. Agentic work is horrible for stealing our attention and the way it encodes in our brain as unfinished threads that occupy mental bandwidth. I keep it all in tasks now like everything else. Even "Go prompt agent X.". I have several projects I just prompt once a day with a thinking agent. And I only work on things that have some meaningful result driven outcome that aligns with my overall goals. No more "I am doing this because I can projects" or if I do start those they are much smaller and constrained. It helps. I still feel like I could be doing more, but I think it is a fundamental misalignment of how agentic workflows hijack our brain's reward system and I am extremely cautious about it now.

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Hoodedcrow 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Much like with artists 90% of the commercial stuff - copy/ads with generic guy in suit picture - will be AI that is "good enough".

Eh, wouldn't be sure. Every time I see slop in such a context, it makes my day worse. And usually ensures I wouldn't go to that business, or at least unconsciously biases me against it.