Readit NewsYou'll find that this is a little awkward. The natural resting position of your hands is with the palms facing inwards, not down.
This is the key one I think. At one extreme you can tell an agent "write a for loop that iterates over the variable `numbers` and computes the sum" and they'll do this successfully, but the scope is so small there's not much point in using an LLM. On the other extreme you can tell an agent "make me an app that's Facebook for dogs" and it'll make so many assumptions about the architecture, code and product that there's no chance it produces anything useful beyond a cool prototype to show mom and dad.
A lot of successful LLM adoption for code is finding this sweet spot. Overly specific instructions don't make you feel productive, and overly broad instructions you end up redoing too much of the work.
It cognitively feels very similar to other classic programming activities, like modularization at any level from architecture to code units/functions, thoughtfully choosing how to lay out and chunk things. It's always been one of the things that make programming pleasurable for me, and some of that feeling returns when slicing up tasks for agents.
It's the equivalent of saying anyone excited about being able to microwave Frozen meals is a hack who couldn't make it in the kitchen. I'm sorry, but if you don't see how ridiculous that assertion is then I don't know what to tell you.
>And I totally agree with him. Throwing some kind of fallacy in the air for the show doesn't make your argument, or lack of, more convincing.
A series of condescending statements meant to demean with no objective backing whatsoever is not an argument. What do you want me to say ? There's nothing worth addressing, other than pointing out how empty it is.
You think there aren't big shots, more accomplished than anyone in this conversation who are similarly enthusiastic?
You and OP have zero actual clue. At any advancement, regardless of how big or consequential, there are always people like that. It's very nice to feel smart and superior and degrade others, but people ought to be better than that.
So I'm sorry but I don't really care how superior a cook you think you are.
I think both things can be true simultaneously.
You're arguing against a straw man.
Please tell me, "Were people excited about high-level languages just programmers who 'couldn't hack it' with assembly? Maybe you are one of those? Were GUI advocates just people who couldn't master the command line?"
Honestly, I still think there's truth to what I wrote, and I don't think your counter-examples prove it wrong per-se. The prompt I responded to ("why are people taking this seriously") also led fairly naturally down the road of examining the reasons. That was of course my choice to do, but it's also just what interested me in the moment.
What it's trying to express is that the (T)PM job still should still be safe because they can just team-lead a dozen agents instead of software developers.
Take with a grain of salt when it comes to relevance for "coding", or the future role breakdown in tech organizations.
> Senior Technical Product Manager
yeah i'd wager they didn't read (let alone write) much code to begin with..
This blog post is influencer content.
I very much enjoy the actively of writing code. For me, programming is pure stress relief. I love the focus and the feeling flow, I love figuring out an elegant solution, I love tastefully structuring things based on my experience of what concerns matter, etc.
Despite the AI tools I still do that: I put my effort into the areas of the code that count, or that offer intellectually stimulating challenge, or where I want to make sure to explore manually think my way into the problem space and try out different API or structure ideas.
In parallel to that I keep my background queue of AI agents fed with more menial or less interesting tasks. I take the things I learn in my mental "main thread" into the specs I write for the agents. And when I need to take a break on my mental "main thread" I review their results.
IMHO this is the way to go for us experienced developers who enjoy writing code. Don't stop doing that, there's still a lot of value in it. Write code consciously and actively, participate in the creation. But learn to utilize and keep busy agents in parallel or when you're off-keyboard. Delegate, basically. There's quite a lot of things they can do already that you really don't need to do because the outcome is completely predictable. I feel that it's possible to actually increase the hours/day focussing on stimulating problems that way.
The "you're just mindlessly prompting all day" or "the fun is gone" are choices you don't need to be making.