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Do the engineers not derive enjoyment in their jobs from making the customer experience better? This does track with what I've experience in my career, where we've gone from everything being to better the user experience to tech companies sort of trying to out-do each other in their technical solutions while the software continuously gets worse and more antagonistic.

A better way to put it is that these things do have value to the customer, the customer just doesn't have a way to understand how the work you're doing provides value because it's the part of the product you don't see. If you clean up technical debt, improve test coverage, improve your deployment systems, etc, it doesn't change the immediate customer experience in a meaningful way, but it does allow you to deliver the changes that customers do see faster and with fewer risks.

This quote makes it seem like the work is self-indulgent, and I have seen that happen sometimes, but it's not half of what we do.

Perhaps those “good engineers” need a reminder of who enables their situation to exist at all.

By that logic, pair programming should have taken off

Certainly puts "good" into perspective

Are you all hiring?

I mean if half of what you do isn’t delivering customer value maybe you don’t need to have as many good engineers on the team as you do.

If you're anything like me, and you stay in a coding/dev/IC track for your career because you like the work, you will eventually hit a point where you start thinking it's all meaningless. This happened before AI for me, but AI certainly reinforces it.

You come to a point where you realize that you're not doing anything that creative, or nothing you haven't done hundreds of times before, maybe every few years you switch to whatever new tech stack has gotten popular, but it's fundamentally all the same. And you start to realize that everything you do has a lifespan of a few years, and then you (or probably someone else) will re-do it.

As retirement starts feeling like it is something that will happen sooner than later, you look back and see that almost nothing you've built is still in use, or will be for very long after you're gone.

I hope to retire in about two years. At that point, I plan to not be using any technology or computers in my life for a while, or as little as possible. Maybe at some point I'll rediscover some of the fun I used to have writing programs for myself, but I suspect I'll need a long break before that happens.

I was exactly this way ... maybe a year or so ago.

But honestly I've stopped being excited to type out code in my personal projects anymore either. I've become much more excited by what I can accomplish on my own in a small number of hours squeezed between work and family. I still experience this as a loss, but I'm no longer so sad about it, and moreso feel invigorated by the possibilities and opportunities that have been opened up.

A way that I have come to think about this is: I used to always be curious about the product management role. How exciting to come up with ideas and validate them with users. But I always demurred because it would be so frustrating to have to rely on other people to bring those ideas to fruition! On balance, I always preferred being the one executing ideas to being the one generating and validating them. But now I can properly do both things! (In my hobby time, that is, at work we still have this idea/execution split, at least for the time being.)

FWIW, I was just like you but then completely gave in and found enjoyment in the act of simply ideating and shipping. The gap now between idea and implementation is so small. At first I was depressed but now I'm in the acceptance phase of grief. We aren't going back, for better or for worse.

Heh, my employer kept pushing us to use Copilot. And over the last months the cli has actually gotten halfway decent... So I did start using it. Albeit sparingly because the token allotment was always pretty low.

Then they announced that they removed the limit/making further request just cost extra for them. That's when I started using it as I did for my personal projects I pay subscriptions for...

Then Copilot increased their pricing. Announced in April I think? But took effect this month. This Monday they announced that the limits are back in effect. So I guess I'll be going back to hand coding next week, as my tokens are about to run out ಥ ‿ ಥ

Corporate is always so silly. I mean I know how it happens: everyone just wants to get their bonus, so different management roles try to coerce the employees to do whatever best serves their bottomline - rarely related to whatever is good for the corporation... But it's always silly to live through it.

If I'm forced to do more work I don't enjoy, I expect to be compensated better. So now you have the cost of the AI and salary increase to deal with.

I'm of the opinion that "true art"/cultural artifacts can't be automated by definition, as they derive their value from the human experience embedded in them by their creators.

OTOH, I think we absolutely SHOULD automate necessary "drudgery" type work wherever we can, but we're going to need a radical reconceptualization of how we distribute the spoils of economic productivity as a result. Unfortunately, I think the type of reconceptualization we'd need would entail a complete overhaul of many long-established and deeply-internalized concepts (rights and duties of ownership of intellectual and private property, decoupling of identity and occupation, etc.), and from everything I've seen, that will be a long and painful process assuming it's even achievable. (Especially in the US, where decades of pro-business messaging has yielded a culture that equates income-earning ability/entrepreneurial success with individual human worth. I really struggle to imagine a path toward unwinding that, but there's little chance it'll be a smooth ride.)

I remember a book I read as a pre-teen, 40 or so years ago, about a kid who wanted to be "perfect". A wear a tree of broccoli on a string around your neck to learn how to overcome embarrassment. A perfect person never makes mistakes, and the best way to not make mistakes is to not do anything. Similar "requirements" of perfection and their expression are presented. The kid eventually finds himself in an empty room, by himself, doing nothing, wearing broccoli. Perfection was achieved, but at the cost of an extremely boring life.

Education and healthcare are both ridiculously overpriced in the US for reasons that have little to do with service costs. Questionable financial systems behind these services are much more to blame.

>It's the reason the costs of things like education and healthcare are downright extortionate, the reason you're paying back your college well into your fifties, the reason you don't call an ambulance for someone in the US because you don't want to ruin their life financially.

You might wanna think again on that line of reasoning, because plenty of other countries have the same dynamics with respect to service employees, but they don't suffer the very US-only problem of ridiculous education and healthcare costs where calling an ambulance can ruin someones life.

As a former first responder, I'm interested in hearing more about how AI-powered ambulance services would work. (related question: will the 911 dispatchers be AI?)

> It sucks for the employees, otoh it might be the only way we're going to beat Baumol's Cost Disease. In the past few decades productivity has exploded, but service employees have largely failed to increase productivity in any way because it's harder to automate these tasks. It's the reason the costs of things like education and healthcare are downright extortionate, the reason you're paying back your college well into your fifties, the reason you don't call an ambulance for someone in the US because you don't want to ruin their life financially.

Weird. I thought it was the fact that you have a cohort of people who are grossly overpaid to represent people who do none of the work yet expect an ever-increasing amount of value created by the work to be shifted to them every 90 days, no matter what, forever.

> We may have to trade the personal fulfillment in these jobs for the broader affordable access to these services.

Then you'll run into two problems:

1) no one will want to do necessary jobs without increased compensation, which is at the root of your analysis of "Baumol's Cost Disease"

2) at least in the US, you'll have a bunch of increasingly miserable people living in a society that gives them less and less to lose while increasing the availability of things that allow them to take out their frustrations upon themselves (substances) or others (weapons)

I think that's a very simplistic take, it doesn't account for people who need to support children's education and/or healthcare for parents.

Both are areas where costs are going up at a rate which is much higher than official inflation rates, and comp increases often don't even match inflation!

So the need for working till you're forced to give up still remains.

For me it feels less like filling out reports, and more like mentoring an intern who can search for stuff really quickly but forgets everything at the end of the day due to anterograde amnesia.

Except the intern is trapped inside an iron lung and must communicate entirely by text. And also has zero real creativity or self-motivation.

Here in stupid town we stab ourselves with knives. It hurts and we get infections but everybody does it. We don't even remember why we do it any more but we do so you have to as well.

The real problem is the amount of value that gets left on the table.

Also, mental health is just as much a part of health and well-being as the physical.

That is definitely not what everybody else does. Some people try harder to find the things that they enjoy doing that provide value to others.

This poster wasn’t claiming they were entitled. What kind of question is this?

One imagines that quality of life ought to increase as technology evolves and the economy grows.

> Is everyone entitled to a high quality of life

Yes.

Driving everyone's QoL to be as bad as possible will lead to increasing enshittiffication in the entire market.

Consumers will be spoiled for choice between deeply mediocre options.

Besides, what's the point of adopting new technologies if it's not to increase the quality of life? If everyone just exists in service of the product development lifecycle, who and what are the products actually for?

People are definitely entitled to complaining about decreasing quality of life and not liking causes of such changes.

Believing pride in ones work is important, a communist makes you not. And sweeping ideas away by categorising the idea is the destruction of debate.

The box is stochastic by design, and has an untraceable amount of complexity between its context and output by nature.

It may be fun to look at inputs and outputs, but it's not hackable and trying to map one into the other is more like astrology than a science.

The third sentence got to what my objection was going to be. It's fun trying to make the thing do what you want it to do! That's why many of us like computers. It's the randomness that sucks and makes the process unsatisfying.

That's just just a slot machine

Right. Somewhere there’s a dashboard which lists those 6 hours as time saved.

Being alienated from the outcome of your labor is far from my idea of heaven.

Not if you enjoy making things and take pride in your work.

That's some odd image of heaven.

I never let it go into planning mode, other than to output a plan file that I can audit before giving it the go-ahead to implement. After that I don't want to be bothered, so --dangerously-skip-permissions keeps all but real questions out of the loop, and I can do something else while it works rather than babysit.

I do it with every project I go into. First step is setting up the documentation so that the agent can navigate it quickly, knows the idioms, knows the test gating procedure, design principles, coding standards, testing policies, etc.

Once that's set up, I spend time laying out the planning for whatever feature or fix is being worked on. For fixes the agent is pretty quick and usually needs little guidance. For new features it's best to have more of a hand on the tiller.

Wow... Our experiences have been very different, then. I've found each upgrade of Opus to be a noticeable improvement in its complex reasoning and delegation capabilities over its predecessor.

To me, this feels in many ways like a technical manager or team lead's job, where I guide the process along using my knowledge and experience, and then let the agent fill in the rest (to the best of its ability).

The agent can't really learn from its mistakes (at least, not without consuming precious context), so I apply a blameless postmortem process, updating the guardrails whenever it goes astray in the same way more than once.

And really, I'd rather be contemplating the more difficult and interesting questions of architecture, environment, ergonomics and market fit, so it suits me fine.

I think this is just a misunderstanding of how most technology has always worked?

Consider what is happening in most construction sites. The heavy work is absolutely from the technology on site. But without people there to oversee it and keep it working, it would fail.

And that is almost certainly true at any industrial site. Indeed, look up videos of high tech looms. A large portion of the technology added to them are so that the operators can locate the fault and fix it.

AI should be assisting us, instead it's doing the job and it's us being an assistant to it.

If you're a manager and you ask a report to do something and they come back with a question, does that mean you're now their assistant?

I give agents the tasks, I answer their questions, I make choices about the tradeoffs in their plan, I supervise their implementation, I review their output, I have them walk me through things. In what way is this not delegating to them and managing their work, just like a more junior employee?

The problem (okay, one of the problems) with renting other people's models is, as you mentioned, that they can and will change out the model without notifying you ahead of time, and you don't always get to control which model you use. (They might decide to retire it, and you won't be able to get it back if they do).

Which is why (well, part of why) I think the long-term trend will be towards self-hosting models. Right now the frontier models are far enough ahead of the self-hosted ones that there are lots of people willing to pay by the token to rent someone else's model, because they get more value for money from that than from self-hosting models.

But the frontier companies won't be able to keep up their current levels of expenditure forever. At some point the investors are going to say "Hey, so, um, when am I going to see some return on my investment?" and then the current subsidized subscriptions (including the one my employer uses) are going to go away, much like what happened with Copilot this month.

And then the locally-hosted models are going to suddenly look like a more attractive picture. Because where you might have been willing to spend $100/month/employee to rent time on models in someone else's data center, you might suddenly balk at spending $500/month/employee. You might say "Hey, you know what? A $50,000 up-front capital investment is only, what, one month's worth of subscriptions for our 100 employees? Yeah, okay, I'll approve the hardware purchase. Get that self-hosted model set up and then we'll cancel the subscription and switch over."

Not everyone is going to do that. But once the locally-hosted models are good enough, the first few people who do so and report success are going to start a snowball effect. And it will likely be driven by money first, but it will also have the effect, that people will slowly discover, of meaning that you can better predict the model you're using. It will continue to work the same way next year that it is working this year; or if it doesn't, it's because you chose to install the new version.

And when that happens (I'm saying "when", not "if" because although it might take some time, I think it's inevitable in the long run), the frontier-model rental companies are going to struggle to stay afloat. Except for the ones who saw this coming and transitioned to a non-subscription income source somehow (maybe by selling licenses to self-host their frontier models for $$BIGNUM), or who have some other revenue stream besides renting out models.

That sounds weirdly gendered even though there's no reason it should be.

Are you getting LLMsplained? :)

Well... as a human software engineer, I've been the one with very strong, intelligent, completely wrong takes. The question is, are the LLMs improving faster than you can improve a junior dev? And is their ceiling as high?

That’s a problem with the tool not the people. AI is marketed literally as writing one sentence and having some app perfectly output. Just check any of the landing pages for Claude code or codex or GitHub copilot…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwfNjGxa_D4

I think the old report you're referencing is this [1] from July 2025, but I can't find a new report. This [2] links to a new dataset at the bottom (that maybe shows improvements?) but it seems like they chose not to write it up because of perceived flaws in their study. Is there a more relevant report I'm missing?

[1]: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

[2]: https://metr.org/blog/2026-02-24-uplift-update/#wider-adopti...

Well the obvious is that, monkey-see-monkey-do, and they don't want to miss out. But the insidious externality is that they are the most likely ones (and higher ups) to be invested in nvidia and others, so when they push you to use, it creates a viscous cycle.

March 2026:

https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-acceleration-whiplash-takeaways

Faros would tell you shops are shipping 16% more PRs with heavy AI use.

https://unessays.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap

I think that's wrong because it doesn't adequately account for the quality and rework their data show.

True but it also depends on the initial audience that sets the tone, and the time zone. In my empirical experience, pro-AI posts fare much better when West Coast is awake, and response is more muted when Europe is awake.

Yeah its hard to deny just the raw throughput from the AI. Like it really is doing work in hours that would take me days.

But those times when I had to drop down into a repl and play around with the output of a method. Or try different ways of doing what anyone else would think is boring, like array manipulation - that's a lot of what I actually LIKE to do.

A big part of me just hopes I can hang in there for another... decade, or two. Then I can retire! Maybe.

I think a lot of developers who enjoy writing code are in an internal battle knowing they could write it themselves or AI could do it and probably do at same speed or many times faster. It's a contradiction as a developer because we always want to do whatever it is we are doing at the optimal speeds but we also like writing code. So, you're being forced to choose where you stand at a fundamental level.

So we're now in this world where everyone is instantly 10x more productive at turning their thoughts into code. Now, think about the coworkers you've had that are middling to mediocre. Do you want them to have a tool that makes them 10x more productive?

That's what I wonder about, what happens to all those folks.

Maybe this is the AI layoff wave we'll see. Sorting out incompetent team members.