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Comment by btown | Hacker News Reader

A C-level executive I know is getting a top-of-the-line new Mac simply to function as a personal build server and host for agentic coding instances - they are able to orchestrate so many parallel projects that they're hitting RAM limits from sessions and the builds and local test runs they're kicking off (largly unsupervised). Before AI, they'd only had a MacBook Air; this completely changes their workflows. They talk about how many other executives they've met are equally giddy at having gone from coding few to no projects themselves, to coding more projects in parallel than any of their respective pre-AI technical colleagues.

I'd suspect that agentic coding has birthed so many new effective engineers, that the entire dynamics of demand for high-end machines have been upended.

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The general problem I have with this is that I think those C-level executive should be doing C-level stuff and not programmer stuff. If you're using AI to help with your main job, great! If you're using AI to do someone else's work, then I think maybe you should change jobs. If you want to be a programmer, go for it! But not at the expense of your "real" job.

I'm pretty sure the C-level people don't want us programmers faffing around with their roles. Why are they encroaching into ours? Don't they already have enough to do; setting the direction of the company, making sure it's profitable, selling things to people, etc.?

It very much depends what projects they are coding. One thing agentic coding is really good for is developing highly specific custom applications specifically for your own use case. This can include the kinds of decision support and analytics tasks a C-level relies on to understand how their organisation is functioning, what's actually going on, and where the gaps are.

My team is using coding agents to develop analytics and reporting applications, and an engineering automation application, specific to our needs, that simply would not exist otherwise. The cost and time would be far too great. I can easily imagine there are plenty of cases like this, for all sorts of roles, including managerial ones, where only the person doing the job understands the job well enough to specify a requirement and guide an agent to code exactly what they need.

ram? coding instances? i suspect this is not doing any inference on the machine and i also suspect the ram use is due to a bagilion node/python processes running.

nothing like 600mb of for type check server another 500 for webpack and another 600 for the inevitable electron wrapper you didnt know about. python isnt as bad but still not great.

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