I will definitely sleep on agents. Normal LLM use, fine, but I am not giving up reasoning.
Ouch! Reminds me of:
- I'm never going to use cell phones. I care about voice quality (me decades ago)
- I'm never going to use VoIP. I care about voice quality (everyone but me 2 decades ago).
- I'm never going to use a calculator. I am not going to give up on reasoning.
- I'm never going to let my kids play with <random other ethnicity>. I care about good manners.
I don't really get the sentiment. If you're in engineering/computers, you are fundamentally in the business of replacing people with technology. Cloud solutions resulted in people in IT/dev ops losing their jobs. So much SW out there has displaced real people in the last 5 decades.
Do you want to go back to the days of dealing with switchboard operators to make phone calls?
This happened only in the phantasy world of deluded MBAs who were sold on the narrative of the cloud operators taking over their infrastructure management. If you ever worked on any of the hyperscaler-based infrastructure, it is actually more complex than the more simple on-premise setups people used to have. I am not saying it is bad that way, I actually enjoy working with the cloud more than with on-premise stuff, but just to highlight you are just making such a bad comparison here.
I'm never going to use use Blockchain.
I'm never going to use use NFTs.
all this agent stuff sounded stupid to me until I tried it out in the last few weeks, and personally, it's been great - I give a not-that-detailed explanation for what I want, point it at the existing code and get back a patch to review once I'm done making my coffee. sometimes it's fine to just apply, sometimes I don't like a variable name or whatever, sometimes it doesn't fit in with the other stuff so I get it to try again, sometimes (<< 10% of the time) it's crap. the experience is pretty much like being a senior dev with a bunch of very eager juniors who read very fast.
anyway, obviously do whatever you want, but deriding something you've not looked in to isn't a hugely thoughtful process for adapting to a changing world.
> anyway, obviously do whatever you want, but deriding something you've not looked in to isn't a hugely thoughtful process for adapting to a changing world.
I have tried it. Not sure I want to be part of such world, unfortunately.
> the experience is pretty much like being a senior dev with a bunch of very eager juniors who read very fast.
I... don't want that. Juniors just slow me down because I have to check what they did and fix their mistakes.
(this is in the context of professional software development, not making scripts, tinkering etc)
> (this is in the context of professional software development, not making scripts, tinkering etc)
I understand the sentiment. A few months ago they wanted us to move fast and dumped us (originally 2 developers) with 4 new people who have very little real world coding experience. Not fun, and very stressful.
However, keep in mind that in many workplaces, handling junior devs poorly means one of two things:
1. If you have some abstruse domain expertise, and it's OK that only 1-2 people work on it, you'll be relegated to doing that. Sadly, most workplaces don't have such tasks.
2. You'll be fantastic in your output. Your managers will like you. But they will not promote you. After some point, they expect you to be a leverage multiplier - if you can get others to code really well, the overall team productivity will exceed that of any superstar (and no, I don't believe 10x programmers exist in most workplaces).