[jdmoreira]

Not sure about that golden end state. Mine would be being in a room surround by screens with AI agents coding, designing, testing, etc. I would be there in the center giving guidance, direction, applying taste, etc… All conversational, wouldn’t need to touch the keyboard 99% of the time.

That's what I want and look forward one day

[Roritharr]

Is this a me thing, or a millenial thing?

I hate using voice for anything. I hate getting voice messages, I hate creating them. I get cold sweats just thinking about having to direct 10 AI Agents via voice. Just give me a keyboard and a bunch of screens, thanks.

[forgotoldacc]

I'm a millennial. I refuse to use voice controls. Never used them in my life and hope I never have to. There's a block in my brain that just refuses to let me talk to a machine to give it orders.

Though I'll gladly call it various foul names when it's refusing to do what I expected it to do.

[SV_BubbleTime]

You guys all sound like you have more hands than I do. And nothing else in them.

[Demiurge]

My jaw hurts after an hour long meeting. I lose my voice after 2 hours. Can’t say I’ve ever noticed finger fatigue, even after 16 hours of typing and playing guitar.

Yeah, I think I’d rather click and type than talk, all day.

[Tsarp]

Probably worth trying one of the many dictation apps out there based on whisper. They can get most coding terms(lib names, tech stack names) accurately and its one of those things you have to really try for a week before dismissing fully.

1. Superwhisper - https://superwhisper.com

2. Macwhisper - https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper

3. Carelesswhisper - https://carelesswhisper.app

[shermantanktop]

Remind me: 20 years

Some of us who’ve been in this game for a while consider having healthy hands to be a nice break between episodes of RSI, PT, etc. YMMV of course but your muscle stamina won’t be the problem, it’s your tendons and eventually your joints.

[Tsarp]

Voice as an interface is a life changer if you've ever had any bit of RSI at any point.

[abtinf]

> My jaw hurts after an hour long meeting

I’m very sorry for you if this is literally true. I would urge you to seek medical help, as this is not normal at all.

[awestroke]

You may want to try listening to others during meetings rather than talk ceaselessly

[mcintyre1994]

The only AI feature I want added to WhatsApp is transcribing voice messages!

[jdjxjdjnsn]

I don't get why this isn't a feature for a long time yet

[tobad357]

There is but needs to be enabled. Go to Settings > Chats > Voice message transcripts and turn the feature on

[oezi]

English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian only

[diggan]

I'd wager that probably covers only ~30% of the world population, and considering that people who speak Mandarin for example use other apps, it probably covers an even larger slice of the Whatsapp userbase.

[pigeonhole123]

On my iPhone I can choose from hundreds of languages

[mcintyre1994]

Awesome, thanks!

[stefanfisk]

I’m the same. I love that writing allows you to think while typing so that you can review and revise your thoughts before letting them out in the world.

And don’t get me started on video vs text for learning purely non-physical stuff like programming…

[fhd2]

I'm another millennial that doesn't like them. I type pretty fast, around 100 WPM, so outside environments where I can't type (e.g. while driving), I just never saw the appeal. Typing has a way of helping me shape my thoughts precisely that I couldn't replicate with first thinking about what I want to say, and then saying it precisely.

But I can appreciate that sitting down in front of a keyboard and going at it with low typing speed seems unnatural and frustrating for probably the majority of people. To me, in front of a keyboard is a fairly natural state. Somebody growing up 15 years before (got by without PCs in their early years) or after me (got by with a smartphone) probably doesn't find it as natural.

[viraptor]

It's practice... Consciously try using the voice input for a while and see how you feel after a few days. I ended up liking it for some things more than others. This is typed via voice with minor edits after. This relies on the new models though - the older systems just didn't work as well.

[esperent]

I've consciously tried doing this for the past month on Android when chatting to Claude... when I'm alone. Don't think I could ever feel comfortable doing it around people.

I think I'm marginally faster using speech to text than using a predictive text touch keyboard.

But it makes enough mistakes that it's only very slightly faster, and I have a very mild accent. I expect for anyone with a strong accent it's a non starter.

On a real keyboard where I can touch type, it's much slower to use voice. The tooling will have to improve massively before it's going to be better to work by speaking to a laptop.

[Wowfunhappy]

Voicemail universally sucks. However, when you're having a synchronous conversation with actual people, do you prefer to do everything via IM, or would you prefer a phone call?

[all2]

Email. Async comms make sense 99% of the time at my job. Unless there's deep work to be done, or pie-in-the-sky idea fabricating. Or rubber-ducky sessions. But I won't do those with AI.

[skydhash]

Email is Calm Technology[0] for collaborative knowledge work, where you expected to spend hours on a single task. If something needs brainstorming, or quick back and forth, you jump on a more synchronous type of conversation (IM, call, in person meeting).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calm_technology

[tuckerman]

I almost never prefer a phone call, I'd rather go all the way to video/in-person or stick with text. I also prefer to push anything important that isn't extremely small out of instant messaging and to email.

Brainstorming/whiteboarding, 1:1s or performance feedback, team socialization, working through something very difficult (e.g. pair debugging): in-person or video

Incidents, asking for quick help/pointers, small quick questions, social groups, intra-team updates: IM

Bigger design documents and their feedback, trickier questions or debugging that isn't urgent, sharing cool/interesting things, inter-team updates: Email

[dmd]

IM, 100%. Otherwise only the loud people ever speak, whether or not they have anything useful to say.

[ribelo]

> do you prefer to do everything via IM, or would you prefer a phone call?

It's hard for me to believe that there are psychopaths among us who prefer call on the phone, slack huddle or even organize meetings instead of just calmly writing messages on IM over coffee.

[codemac]

receiving audio = slow

sending audio = fast

[dcsan]

Yes this is known etiquette eg in China where voice memos are widely used on WeChat. Sending a voice memo is slightly rude for business as it says I the sender value my time to dash something off more even if it’s inconvenient for you the receiver who has to then stop and listen to it. Between friends is a bit different as voice has a level of personal warmth.

[jdmoreira]

I don't know. I'm 40 but I do like pair programming so…

[dionian]

I would agree but i use voice heavily with AI agents and here is why: no matter how fast i can type, i can speak much faster, and while i do other tasks.

[fnordpiglet]

One advantage is speaking is generally faster than typing. Imagine instead of talking to a bunch of AI you’re talking to a room full of coworkers about the architecture to develop.

[csto12]

If that’s the future, that means a massive reduction in software engineers no? What you are describing would require one technical product manager, not a team of software engineers.

[Wowfunhappy]

Or a massive increase in the amount of software that gets written.

If the cost of writing software goes down, demand for it will presumably go up...

[energy123]

I would guess it's most likely both. The world could use a lot more software but it's not an unlimited appetite and the increase in productivity of SWEs will depress wages.

[fragmede]

Just like chainsaws depressed the wages of lumberjacks, and cars decreased the need for people to move around.

[dickersnoodle]

Only if there is something for that software to do.

[fragmede]

How many places have you worked where there's no backlog in Jira and the engineers legitimately have nothing to do other than sit around waiting for work to get assigned ‽

[usrnm]

> that means a massive reduction in software engineers

That's exactly what everyone is hoping for. Well, everyone except software engineers, of course

[throwa27482]

Define everyone. I know a lot of SWEs who don't take their job for granted, always strive to add value, and try to keep skilled constantly and try to be extremely helpful. Maybe in SV where the salaries are high there is some schadenfreude but I don't see that on general for what is a worldwide industry. In most places it's just a standard job.

I don't understand the pleasure of putting people out of work and the pain on people's lives and careers but I guess that's just me.

[jdmoreira]

The valuable skills will be creativity, taste, curation, prioritisation etc.

All those skills can be applied to engineering as well. What makes Fabrice Bellard great? Its not just technical skill I think.

I think some of the most successful people will be a subset of engineers but also Steve Jobs types and artists

[pjmlp]

Most companies don't care about developers of their level, rather they offshore to the lowest bid.

[CuriouslyC]

Except that AI agents are the new offshoring. The new hotshot developer will be someone who understands what clients want deeply, knows the domain, has sufficient engineering skill to understand the system that needs to be built and is able to guide swarms of coding agents efficiently.

Having all this in one person is super valuable because you lose a lot of speed and fidelity in information exchange between brains. I wouldn't be surprised if someone could hit like 30-50 kloc/day within a few years. I can hit 5-10kloc/day doing this stuff depending on a lot of factors, and that's driving ~2 agents at a time mostly. Imagine driving 20.

[pjmlp]

I know how it feels, because I have been in enough projects driving offshoring teams.

Here is an unwanted advice, it is not going to be the new hotshot developer, rather hotshot technical and solution architects.

The dream of CASE tools is finally here, pump the requirements into the software factory (aks instruction files), and the replicator handles the rest.

[CuriouslyC]

You can't just be a solution architect, you have to be a systems architect, which is sort of the culmination of the developer skillset. I don't write code anymore really, but I know the purpose of everything my agents are doing and when they're making mistakes. I also have to know the domain, and be able to interact with clients, but without the technical chops I wouldn't be able to deliver on the level that I do.

[paulddraper]

Yes.

[fragmede]

How hard do you really think the job of “technical product manager” is? I'm not asking in a childish "management doesn't do anything" sort of way, but want to frame the question "if software engineers needed to retrain to be technical product managers, how many would sink, and how many would swim?

[geertj]

I can easily see this happening in 2-3 years. Some chat apps already have outstanding voice mode, such as GPT-4o. It's just a matter of integrating that voice mode, and getting the understanding and generated code to be /slightly/ better than it is today.

[fragmede]

That future's maybe closer than that.

https://zackproser.com/blog/openai-codex-review

[rco8786]

It seems unlikely that any one individual would be able to output a sufficient amount of context for that to not go off the rails really quickly (or just be extremely inefficient as most agents sit idle waiting for verification of their work)

[cortesoft]

Basically the Star Trek model of computing.

[weikju]

All that’s really needed for this to work is a team of writers and plot conveniences.

[dpkirchner]

And a general acceptance that every week something will go horribly wrong.

[arguflow]

In this "end state" what would the AI mind machine even have to code?

[chamomeal]

That sounds like torture for me lol