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Comment by tikimcfee | Hacker News Reader

Ya know, I have to admit feeling something like this. Normally, the amount of stuff I put together in a work day offers a sense of completion or even a bit of a dopamine bump because of a "job well done". With this recent work I've been doing, it's instead felt like I've been spending a multiplier more energy communicating intent instead of doing the work myself; that communication seems to be making me more tired than the work itself. Similar?

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It feels like we all signed up to be ICs, but now we’re middle managers and our reports are bots.

> and our reports are bots.

With no gossip, rivalry or backstabbing. Super polite and patient, which is very inspiring.

We also brutally churning them by "laying off" the previously latest model once the new latest is available.

I forget where I saw this (a Medium post, somewhere) but someone summed this up as "I didn't sign up for this just to be a tech priest for the machine god".

Someone commented yesterday that managers and other higher-ups are "already ok with non-deterministic outputs", because that's what engineers give them.

As a manager/tech-lead, I've kind of been a tech priest for some time.

Which is why it's so funny to hear seasoned engineers lament the probabilistic nature of AI systems, and how you have to be hand setting code to really think about the problem domain.

They seem to all be ICs that forget that there are abstraction layers above them where all of that happens (and more).

You’re possibly not entering into the flow state anymore.

Flow is effortless. and it is rejuvenating.

I believe:

While communication can be satisfying, it’s not as rejuvenating as resting in our own Being and simply allowing the action to unfold without mental contraction.

Flow states.

When the right level of challenge and capability align and you become intimate with the problem. The boundaries of me and the problem dissolve and creativity springs forth. Emerging satisfied. Nourished.

Flow state can happen at various levels of abstraction, not just when hand writing code in a gen 3 language.

This is why I think LLMs will make us all a LOT smarter. Raw code made it so we stopped heavily thinking in between but now it's just 100% the most intense thought processes all day long.

It seems pretty obvious that the opposite is true. I know I’ve experienced some serious skill atrophy that I’m now having to actively resist. There’s a lot lost by no longer having to interact with the raw materials of your craft.

Thinking is a skill that is reinforced by reading, designing and writing code. When you outsource your thinking to an LLM your ability to think doesn’t magically improve…it degrades.

Sure my raw coding ability is degraded but my architecting, debugging, and planning have all skyrocketed.

Those always required significantly more though just like before and that's all I do now.

I mean old staff engineers and managers are often not coding at all but they are significantly better designers than a freshgrad that leetcode grinded for 4 years. Isn't that the same argument?

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