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Comment by robot-wrangler | Hacker News Reader

Claims about agentic workflows are the new version of "works on my machine" and should be treated with skepticism if they cannot be committed to a repository and used by other people.

Maybe parent is a galaxy-brained genius, or.. maybe they are just leaving work early and creating a huge mess for coworkers who now must stay late. Hard to say. But someone who isn't interested in automating/encoding processes for their idiosyncratic workflows is a bad engineer, right? And someone who isn't interested in sharing productivity gains with coworkers is basically engaged in sabotage.

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> And someone who isn't interested in sharing productivity gains with coworkers is basically engaged in sabotage.

Who says they aren't interested in sharing? To give a less emotionally charged example: I think my specific use pattern of Git makes me (a bit) more productive. And I'm happy to chew anyone's ear off about it who's willing to listen.

But the willingness and ability of my coworkers to engage in git-related lectures, while greater than zero, is very definitely finite.

Something that is advertised as 10x improvement in productivity isn't like your personal preferences for git or a few dinky bash aliases or whatever. It's more like a secret personal project test-suite, or a whole data pipeline you're keeping private while everyone else is laboriously doing things manually.

Assuming 10x is real, then again the question: why would anyone do that? The only answers I can come up with are that they cannot share it (incompetence) or that they don't want to (sabotage). You're saying the third option is.. people just like working 8 hours while this guy works 1? Seems unlikely. Even if that's not sabotaging coworkers it's still sabotaging the business

The reason is because we are a Microsoft shop and our company doesn't have Claude account. I'm using my personal Claude Max account. My manager does know that I use Claude Code and I requested the person responsible for AI tooling in our company to use Claude Code but he just said that management already decided to go with GitHub copilot. He thinks that using Claude model in Copilot is same as using Claude Code. Another issue is that we are a Microsoft shop and I use Claude Code through WSL but I'm the only person on our team with Linux skills.

Business and Enterprise plans have a no-training-on-your-data clause.

I’m not sure personal Claude has that. My account has the typical bullshit verbiage with opt-outs where nobody can really know whether they’re enforceable.

Using a personal account is akin to sharing the company code and could get one in serious trouble IMO.

You can opt-out of having your code being trained on. When Claude Code first came out Anthropic wasn't using CC sessions for training. They started training on it starting from Claude Code 2 that came out with Sonnet 4.5. User is asked on first use whether to opt-in or out of training.

Every time I hear “we are a Microsoft shop” makes me remember the scene with Jimmy O Yang and Windows auto updating in Space Force

https://youtu.be/xDLvUqhwHZc

There are methods of connecting the claude code cli tools to copilot’s api — look at litellm or something along those lines, it’s a pip pkg and translates the calls code makes

> You're saying the third option is.. people just like working 8 hours while this guy works 1?

Nope, I don't say that at all.

I am saying that certain accommodations might feel like 10x to the person making them, but that doesn't mean they are portable.

Another personal example: I can claim with a straight face that using a standing desk and a Dvorak keyboard make me 10x more productive than otherwise. But that doesn't necessarily mean that other people will benefit from copying me, even if I'm happy to explain to anyone how to buy a standing desk from Ikea (or how to work company procurement to get one, in case you are working not-from-home).

In any case, the original commenter replied with a better explanation than our speculations here.

> And someone who isn't interested in sharing productivity gains with coworkers is basically engaged in sabotage.

I'll have to vigorously dissent on this notion: we sell our labor to employers - not our souls. Our individual labor, contracts and remuneration are personalized. Our labor. Not some promise to maximize productivity - that's a job for middle and upper management.

Your employer sure as hell won't directly share 8x productivity gains with employees. The best they can offer is a once-off, 3-15% annual bonus (based on your subjective performance, not the aggregate), alternatively, if you have RSU/options, gains on your miniscule ownership fraction.

I'm teaching a course in how to do this to one of my clients this week.

Also, I used this same process to address a bug that is many years old in a very popular library this week. Admittedly, the first solution was a little wordy and required some back and forth, but I was able to get to a clean tested solution with little pain.

It seems to me that the devs that managed to become sergeants of a small platoon of LLM agents to a crushing success deem their setup a competitive advantage and as such will never share it.

But them being humans, they do want to brag about it.

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