> In other words I want to spend 100% of my mental capacity in the problem domain for the things AI cannot do for me, like steering, grounding, verification and not for things AI could do.

It sounds like the parent is less talking about this, and more people burning tokens while not getting useful work done.

This is much like how devs got grilled for creating expensive test VMs on AWS. Someone has to pay for all this at the end of the day.

I dunno, using tools and resources effectively is arguably the essence of good engineering.

I love the typo.

Did they ever have meaning? It's always been a nebulous feels term

I’m trying really hard to keep my skills up but it doesn’t feel productive when I’m using it to write code. It feels like I’m slowing down the AI to the point that it’s not as effective as just letting it go. But I don’t get all the learning that comes from that time along the way.

Have you found ways to stay sharp while using it? Or are you relying on other projects outside of work to keep your skills fresh?

the poster did mention "if it saves 10% of your time".

So be less snarky?

I equate most LLM work to squeezing a glue bottle

It's just glue code

It's not complicated. Someone just has to be there to squeeze the bottle

It's possible it's my role distorting my perception, cause technically I don't write software, I work an SRE role. None of my items come pre-chewed or paced, it's all good luck and god bless.

I'm desperately trying to classify and standardize my work items and delegate them to less capable models, because my usage is clearly unsustainable and this same sentiment as above keeps being pushed on me too. But all my tasks are genuinely fairly arbitrary, so there's no real way around the agent actually being able to reason about business and technical context proper. It's not even that they're hard, it's just that they're dynamic.

I can get Luna to do things like walk our observability stack and perform a healthcheck, then defer to a stronger model if anything looks super off, but if I'm being entirely honest, this could basically be just a script. Which Opus 5.5 will immediately write for itself if it doesn't yet exist, run that, and then off it goes depending. But Luna will never actually do an investigation proper. Heck, it can't even read our dashboards most of the time, tripping up on Grafana minutia.

It feels like that surgeon vs surgeon comparison, where you're made to decide based on their surgery success rate, and the better succeeding surgeon simply reward hacks the number by only operating on less dicey cases. Except there's no objective way to make this classification here, so jackasses like the above get to play with my insecurities with full obnoxious confidence, while I'm left desperately trying to slim my usage and failing to do so between two moments of crippling self doubt and blockers.