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Comment by MinimalAction | Hacker News Reader

Do we need an agent? I get the point of this post: have fun building one because it's easy. But every time I see one of these takes, I keep wondering why do we encourage a tool that would potentially replace us. Why help it build better that could eventually take away what was fun and sustainable income-wise?

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Easy answer: so you can more sharply criticize them, rather than falling into the rhetorical traps of people who don't understand how they work well enough to sound credible. It's so little effort to get to that point!

Interesting to think that this question could have been asked of almost all software work up until this point, except the "us" was always "someone else "

It’s generally been true, but not close to the scale we’re looking at now. The implied/assumed hypocrisy also doesn’t stop it from it sucking, or make it immune to criticism.

Indeed it probably sucks even more in a "you reap what you sow" kind of way :(

I've been building tools for stuff I don't want to do. Any task where I need to take some amount of data, structured or unstructured, and need a specific outcome is perfect. That way I can spend more time on the thing I do want to do (including building these little tools).

I appreciate this thinking. This gives me the vibes of "let me draw, paint, sing for fun, while AI takes care of my chores". I agree with that, but I can’t help but wonder if the agent ever considers whether things you enjoy should be left to you, but takes everything it can.

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