Yes. Definitely. I never did try and error with code snippets from the internet until something sort of worked.
I never hacked things together like this till the sun rose and had no idea 2 weeks later who wrote that hacky mess and why like this. Or well, years later.
And as the code piled up and side problems took over, I certainly did not reimplemented the same functions again and again, because I forgot I did the same already 3 years ago. And that module (and that part and this), that works great as long as you don't touch anything? Yeah, I certainly know how that works in detail. All in control. Gotta fight to keep AI away from my code to stay in control!
I didn't necessarily know everything about my code at all times before.
And that justifies my gleeful embrace of not knowing anything about my code now.
Or did you write your comment with an intentional self-demeaning note, and not a sarcastic tone?
I emphatically do not use multiple agents at a time... I monitor what the agent I'm working with is doing, stop it if it's going down the wrong path and give feedback along the way... don't be afraid to git reset a set of changes, then tell the agent you did so and why. Spend more time on structure and design up front, it will save you a lot of headaches later.
Beyond this, I've found the "5 hour window" that anthropic gives to be pretty helpful... when I've expended my allotment for the window, odds are, I've done enough for the day even. Read, work on something else, etc... know when it's a good time to stop for a day... it's easy to over-work yourself... it takes discipline to actually break for lunch, or the day. For that matter, step away from your desk for lunch and plan to take at least an hour if you can.
You can still deliver a crap ton of value beyond what you individually could do with an agent... but there needs to be a human in the loop for anything that people depend on for their money or livelihood.
I'm not running a bunch of agents in parallel as I actually review/track most of what is getting done while it's happening.. sometimes I'll stop/rollback and rerun with updated instructions. I can't imagine anyone actually doing meaningful reviews of code generated by a half dozen agents running in parallel for example/contrast.
That said, I mostly stand by my statement... at least in how I've been using AI lately.
I might be open to some agent-like behavior, access to a git repo and ticket system. Probably not my whole OS, any more than I'd give to a drunk schitzo I met on the Internet.
I see the appeal to what people have going on. But I've been using LLMs for going on a year, I was slow to adopt and wait-and-see because I didn't need it at the time (deep dive, learning python Ecosystem). I'm glad I stayed the course. I can get great results prompting these things and edit the results with care.
No more burnout than a subordinate working for hire in this mode. Things remain manageable, and I can do all the higher level Dev/Eng/Product work that drives the Coding. Which is a good new challenge to me, never got to go so high up the food chain with so much focus.
Personally, I experienced something different. Before AI, it was the managers who gradually took away the joy and tried to fundamentally alter the profession... AI brought much of the joy back. Until some upstream roles discovered AI and used it as leverage to send larger volumes of bullshit downstream. I got away, sadly some people could not.
And I still enjoy the process actually. It's a different process indeed. But times change, and you can't always do the same thing forever.
This asynchronous engineering progress has allowed me to do more householding in between. It maybe sounds crazy, but I feel it helps me organise my life better. For me it won't cause any burnout anyway.
And this doesn't cover the scenario of code reviews. If, in the example, Ben and Alice are reviewing each other's code - Ben now has twice as much code to review as Alice does, so her AI usage also affects him negatively.
