[chocolatemario]

It’s hard for me to believe that, unless you’re just doing simple glue work or you’re working in a low stakes environments, anyone is just delegating everything to agents. If you’re working on a migration (common in enterprise infrastructure work), you’re familiar with the needless abstractions, and it’s something you’ve done many times over; agents can certainly expedite change. If you’re building anything with depth and you do not have a clear understanding of the underpinning logic, you’re either very gifted in your ability to reason about abstractions or you’re setting yourself for a failure at some point in the future. You need expertise at some point. Programming/debugging as a means of learning a domain is akin to writing as a means of clarifying your thoughts.

That being said, yea enterprise coding can be extremely mundane and it’s setup for learning it deeply then finding a way to do it faster. I’m likely in the 90% range of my work being done by Claude, but I’m working in a domain I’ve got years of experience with hand coding and stepping through code in my debugger.

I think this latter piece is the challenge I’m struggling with. There is an endless amount of work that can be done at my company but as long as the economy is in a weird spot, I’m being led to believe that ai is making me expendable. This is a consequence of the fact that glue work represents 80% of my output (not value). The other 20% of time at work is exploring ideas without guaranteed results, its aligning stakeholders, its testing feasibility with mvps or experts from another area I need some help with. If glue work represents tangible output and conceptual work is something that may not actually have value my manager wants me to explore it, I’m just a glue guy in enterprise while I’m left chasing the dragon of a cool project for me to really sink my teeth into. That project is just a half baked bad idea from someone disconnected with reality. Glue work is measurable in LoC (however useless a metric it is measurable) and it’s certainly paying the bills.