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Comment by jpgvm | Hacker News Reader

It's generally also just less typing if you are using long running agents, you can input the goals, steer it a bit then go for a nice walk and check in again on it in 30-40mins. I hope we can normalise this workflow as it will be much better for everyones health and longevity in the field.

IMO LLMs are the best thing to happen to coding in my ~15 years of being in the game.

I wager they have probably added on another 5-10 years to my engineering career as I was contemplating getting out before they showed up.

Have also been convincing some friends that have "gone woods" over the years to put the woodworking tools down for a day or two and give them a go. So far so good, a few folks have found the spark again and it's been awesome to see them make digital things again too.

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except management expectation will be that you spawn 30 different things and check them every 2 minutes

I'm so confused at how people think that this will be a reality, like, what kind of boss would look at this and go: yep sure my people will only work for a few minutes here and there, let's keep paying them their huge 6 figure salaries ??

am I missing something here..?

There is definitely a limit to how many things you can manage at a time. Maybe 3 or 4 depending on how much context switching you do.

The walk is usually work too, just instead of staring at the screen and trying to think I take a walk and actually think. So when I get back I can provide input to the robot that will result in meaningful output.

Companies that pay people to hit enter instead of using auto-approve/bypass are going to lose to companies that pay people to think and produce results, regardless of how much time they spend in front of the screen or how many prompts they input.

Before I learned any programming skills, I worked with a bunch of great coders and learned a lot from them. I remember being impressed with the guy that would log on to start his day, but then sit back and have some coffee, M&Ms and read the Calvin & Hobbes comic strip from the newspaper (yeah this was long ago.) When I asked him about it, he explained that it was one of the important aspects of the life of a programmer to be aware of: if they are walking around the office with a distracted look on their face, you still want to sort of "knock" before walking right up and dropping a big issue or request on them, they might be doing the most difficult work of their day!

I eventually learned to code and would often find it to be my favorite part of the job--the looking out the window and planning the attack phase.

I’m paying for business value creation, not for the tappy-tappy sounds.

The tappy-tappy is necessary(-ish) but isn’t the thing I care about.

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