That's not exactly really where I hoped my career would lead. It's like managing junior developers, but without having nice people to work with.
- can write code
- tireless
- have no aspirations
- have no stylistic or architectural preferences
- have massive, but at the same time not well defined, body of knowledge
- have no intrinsic memories of past interactions.
- change in unexpected ways when underlying models change
- ...
Edit: Drones? Drains?
- don't have career growth that you can feel good about having contributed to
- don't have a genuine interest in accomplishment or team goals
- have no past and no future. When you change companies, they won't recognize you in the hall.
- no ownership over results. If they make a mistake, they won't suffer.
Coincidentally, the hippocampus looks like a seahorse (emoji). It's all connected.
- constantly give wrong answers, with surprising confidence
- constantly apologize, then make the same mistake again immediately
- constantly forget what you just told them
- ...
They can usually write code, but not that well. They have lots of energy and little to say about architecture and style. Don't have a well defined body of knowledge and have no experience. Individual juniors don't change, but the cast members of your junior cohort regularly do.
NO ONE TALKS TO EACH OTHER unless absolutely necessary for work.
We get on Zooms to talk. Even with the person 1 cubicle over.
Who normalized this?!!
But why? Required? Culture? Maybe it's the company?
With a human, you give them feedback or advice and generally by the 2nd or 3rd time the same kind of thing happens they can figure it out and improve. With an LLM, you have to specifically setup a convoluted (and potentially financially and electrical power expensive) system in order to provide MANY MORE examples of how to improve via fine tuning or other training actions.
The burden of human interaction is removed from building.
> You can verify code quality as a glance, and ship absolute with confidence.
> You can confidently trust and merge the code without hours of manual review.
I couldn't possibly imagine that going wrong.
It's clear now that "agents" in the context of "AI" is really about answering the question "How can we make users make 10x more calls to our models in a way that makes it feel like we're not just squeezing money out of them?" I've seen so many people that think setting some "agents" of on a minutes to hours long task of basically just driving up internal KPIs at LLM providers is cutting edge work.
The problem is, I haven't seen any evidence at all that spending 10x the number of API calls on an agent results in anything closer to useful than last year when people where purely vibe coding all the time. At least then people would interactively learn about the slop they were building.
It's astounding to watch a coworker walk though through a PR with hundreds of added new files and repeatedly mention "I'm not sure if these actually work, but it does look like there's something here".
Now I'm sure I'll get some fantastic "no true Scotsman" replies about how my coworkers must not be skilled enough or how they need to follow xyz pattern, but the entire point of AI was to remove the need for specialize skills and make everyone 10x more productive.
Not to mention that the shift in focus on "agents" is also useful in detracting from clearly diminishing returns on foundation models. I just hope there are enough people that still remember how to code (and think in some cases) to rebuild when this house of cards falls apart.
At least for programming tools, for everything (well, the vast majority, at least) that is sold that way—since long before generative AI—it actually succeeds or fails based not on whether it eliminates need for specialized skills and makes everyone more productive, but whether it further rewards specialized skills, and makes the people who devote time to learning it more productive than if they devoted the same time to learning something else.
Nice? I thought all sycophant LLMs were exceedingly nice.
Sadly, this is not sustainable and I am not sure what I'm going to do.
