The best results I'm seeing with my own work is mixing agent with my reading of the code and advising. I find it super hard to imagine losing the human view right now. Agents produce good code but they too often don't see bigger structures. They duplicate code and logic and then can't find all the copies if it needs updating, they still need a person to say "make a helper" or whatever.
True, but I can't help but notice how far agents' capabilities have grown in just the past six months, so I assume they'll continue to improve to the point where I tend to, unfortunately, agree with Schmidt. I mourn it also — but I suspect 'code' will take a more representational form. So we can describe it to agents, at least in codebases that mix human and AI written code.
But the worst part to me, isn't the part that's making headlines - it's that he thinks we don't have any friends, and that AI will be our friends.
"Because they're social, and they sit there, but they don't have that many friends. So they sit in their office, and they collect 10 Claude friends or 10 Gemini friends."
This individual (Eric Schmidt) is heavily invested in lots of AI companies, which he will selectively disclose.
His entire 'job' is to go on a world tour in parading his own AI investments and for everyone to admit defeat and replace their own confidence with AI.
> "Because they're social, and they sit there, but they don't have that many friends. So they sit in their office, and they collect 10 Claude friends or 10 Gemini friends."
This is what my employer is pushing as well. Instead of writing code, their vision is to turn developers into AI agent managers. Even if I manage to hold on to my job, whatever creative fulfillment I once got from it will be gone. It's incredibly depressing.
Perhaps the next great opportunity is to be the person that designs the best process for setting up and running Schmidt’s ‘invisible AI coding sweat shop’.
Running such an operation is going to be multi-faceted. You have to have the know-how to bring in the AI coding assistants. You have to have a very tight framework for quickly specifying tests, and staying ahead of the bots. The integration. The build processes. The source code management. Etc.
Maybe one person can really be that super productive bot overseer, but they’re going to need tools and strong processes.
I totally get it. What I don’t get is why these perspectives are limited to writing code and not writing or communicating more generally. Just like coding, Eric Schmidt himself is coming to an end. How can smart people not see, writing code is just a canary in the coal mine, a special case that’s only a difference in degree not kind from other sorts of knowledge work?
Sounds like either projection or the start of a crash out. Probably insulted by the booing from the plebs at his speech on stage. [1] The comments are interesting.
"Everyone regretted leaving their tomatoes at home that evening"