[nu11ptr]

People are blown away when I tell them that, in the last 6 months, my job of coding has changed entirely, and that I now write very little code, but instead manage agents who write it. It is still engineering, and I still very much care what that code is, it's interfaces, how it interacts with the world, how it is tested, etc. etc., but it has taken me a while to get used to the idea of me not writing the code. I'm still not sure how I feel about it, although I am getting more done, and it has helped me keep better focus on "the big picture". That is tough to do when your day is spent in the weeds.

[archagon]

I disagree completely that what you describe is still “engineering.”

You are now a manager. In effect, you’ve consented to a career change.

[Gud]

I disagree. Even with agentic coding, you make engineering decisions.

[furyofantares]

Really? When I've brought it up with anyone that doesn't code, I've found them to be totally disinterested in the topic.

[nu11ptr]

It isn't about the code (they probably don't even know what that is), they focus on the fact that my daily job tasks have changed entirely (iow, I used to do 'something', 'what' doesn't matter, and now I dictate to an AI to do it). Most people can't fathom this unless they change to a completely different profession/job.

[thunky]

> I've found that nobody that doesn't code is at all interested in the topic.

This triple-negative is hard to parse.

[TFNA]

I don't code (well, I write scripts for my own personal use and use Emacs), but I follow with interest these reports from software developers. Why? Because my profession is similar screen- and keyboard-based intellectual work, and what has come for devs will probably come for many other careers.

[raddan]

It's worth mentioning that one reason LLMs can clean up on coding tasks is because of the volumes of available data. Not only has the world produced copious volumes of code, they continue to produce copious volumes of code, and some code can even be generated synthetically (ie, not from an LLM, albeit at high cost).

Other domains are not like this. There will probably never be enough poetry out there to make an LLM do anything but be a poor imitation of a poet. This data is extremely hard to generate.

[varjag]

Coding with agents has also entered a positive feedback loop with million developers essentially paying to perform RL on frontier models.

[ffsm8]

Urm, isn't that a terrible example? LLMs are better at poetry and rhyming then most people trying their best...

Also you're thinking with an extremely short time horizon there.

All jobs which are centered around computers will be impacted the same way programming is today in the medium term. It's just a question of time until the data is gathered and tooling is adjusted. Because every company that's currently employing people to do something with software will start to use that data as training material, and a few years later they'll be swallowed along.

So that means eg bookkeeping is still safe... I sincerely doubt it'll be like that in 2035. It'll probably still be somewhat safe in 2030 though

I suspect most industries aren't quiet filled with people like the author though, most people treat their job as... Well, a job.

[llmthrowaway20]

This is a wild take. Of all things, you think a large language model will be stumped by poetry?

I would wager everything I had that an AI could already win a blind poetry contest, especially if any effort was put into fine-tuning it. Unbelievable effort has been put into optimizing them for coding given the financials; next to none for poetry.