[fnordpiglet]

To be fair, taking an average SWE at $160k/y, and spending $1k/m, and offloading mechanical ticket work from their working set sounds like a bargain to me. They could be spending the time on design and planning and working on new things, figuring out how to save costs in optimizations. In fact for every soul sucking mechanical task you offload, the better of you are overall.

It’s not like AI is the first time this happened. CI/CD and extensive preflight and integration and canary testing is also a way of saving engineer time and improving throughput at the cost of latency and compute resources. This is just moving up the semantic stack.

Obviously as engineers we say “awesome more features and products!” but management says “awesome fewer engineers!” either way pasting the ticket in and letting a machine do the work for a fraction of the cost was the right choice. There’s no John Henry award.

[swiftcoder]

> pasting the ticket in and letting a machine do the work for a fraction of the cost was the right choice

If it were producing equivalent outcomes, sure. So far I haven't personally seeing strong evidence for that. LLMs do write code pretty competently at this point, but actually solving the correct problem, and without introducing unintended consequences, is a different matter entirely

[entropicdrifter]

This. LLMs are terrible at planning/architecture and maintaining clarity of vision across a project. There are lots of tools that mitigate these issues but they're going to keep coming up regardless because of the fundamental nature of LLMs.

If you're not doing the design of the solutions for problems as an engineer or at least making the decisions and owning the maintenance of that architecture/design, what even is your job at that point?

[jb3689]

I’ve found LLMs very good at two things: 1. Recommending paths forward, 2. Following established architecture. Your job is to be able to treat the LLM and code as sheep

[anal_reactor]

> LLMs are terrible at planning/architecture and maintaining clarity of vision across a project.

So are many corporations but that doesn't stop them from being economically successful.

[Aurornis]

> and offloading mechanical ticket work from their working set sounds like a bargain to me

Unfortunately the people who offload the work of understanding and interacting with tickets just end up offloading the consequences to everyone else who has to do extra work to make sure their LLM understands the task, review the work to make sure they built the right thing, and on and on.

The same thing happens when people start sending AI bots to attend meetings: The person freed up their own time, but now everyone else has to work hard to make sure their AI bot gets the right message to them and follow up to make sure what was supposed to happen in the meeting gets to them.

[AnimalMuppet]

If someone sends a bot to a meeting, warn them the first time. Fire them the second, for exactly the reason that you said in your last paragraph: They're pushing their work onto other people.

[fnordpiglet]

Managers have processes for correcting for these behaviors and they fall into the second bucket of outcomes I mentioned.