[zelphirkalt]

Well, and now with the push towards AI slop and letting agents do work for you, it is even less about creativity and talent. You can't even chase trends in libraries while still being clever about it any longer, you gotta chase more and more braindead ways of getting code generated based on tons and tons of mediocre code found online, gobbled up by big tech without the original creator s' consent.

[zozbot234]

I think that plenty of 'nerds' would very much disagree about that. Steering agents effectively is something that can take massive amounts of creativity and talent and be quite helpful wrt. the final result. There's no real analogue of this in traditional programming.

[marmarama]

Sure there's an analogue.

It's being the tech lead of a team of junior to mid level developers. You design roughly what the solution should look like, split it into reasonable sized tasks so they don't go off the deep end, advise them on some of the details, then assign them the tasks and let them get on with it, keeping an eye on what they're doing, reviewing their output, and course correcting them when they go wrong.

Just like with a team of humans, you have to use your judgement as to how much supervision they need individually and how large a task you can give them without them going off the rails.

[anygivnthursday]

Thats my thought as well, LLM agents put you in the role of a (often micromanaging) tech/team lead of a small team, but the speed and fast feedback loop makes it look different.

[fragmede]

Oh it's different alright. Yell at a human employee to tell them they're a fucking loser enough times and at best they'll quit on you. The way some people talk to their LLM is ghastly.

[anygivnthursday]

And there are also papers that tell thats effective https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04950

[jimbokun]

Yes.

As AI improves every white collar job becomes a management job. With the previous conception of an Individual Contributor role disappearing.

[anygivnthursday]

And isnt that management job also tomorrow's disappearing IC role? A management agent seems quite possible to me.

[fragmede]

https://ceobench.com/

[SpicyLemonZest]

What’s hard to automate about management is getting employees on board, not the concrete tasks. If an AI instructed you to spend 5 minutes a day talking to it about your day, would you do it?

[anygivnthursday]

No, thats not what gets automated. My comment was for the parent where IC roles transformed to agent managment roles, which I think just another role for agents to manage - themselves. In other words coordination of other agents, not humans, who are now out of the loop.

[eequah9L]

Hm, on each interview since ever, every time the inevitable "where do you see yourself in X years" question popped up, I was like, I have no ambition of getting promoted to managers, if that's what you mean. I like coding. I want to keep coding. I can advise juniors if _that's_ what you mean. But I want to code.

And here I am. Coding is becoming management in front of my eyes.

Meh :-|

[pjmlp]

Sure there is, offshoring, now the chat window is with my computer instead on the other side of the planet.

Not everyone wants to be a team lead not doing coding any longer.

[tripledry]

Also, I'd rather lead a team of humans that I can interact and talk with in real life instead of a team of bots.

[jimbokun]

How so?

The models get better and better at understanding the intent of a prompt and doing more useful work with less intervention.

[nearlyepic]

You keep telling yourself that.

[jimbokun]

The problem was very few nerds realized this was the most likely outcome as they devoted themselves to improving machine intelligence.

[lossyalgo]

And yet even more nerds than ever are devoting themselves to AI. I just wonder - to what end?

[jimbokun]

It’s the only path for being able to pay your rent or mortgage without leaving the technology field altogether.

[pesus]

The phrase "fuck you, I got mine" comes to mind.

The logical end seems to be another case of pulling up the ladder behind them as they climb up, others be damned. Sadly seems to be a pretty universal human trait, whether intentional or not.

[yuye]

I'm a SWE, helping build AI infrastructure.

I get where you're coming from, but I haven't "got mine", at least not yet. I'm still relatively early in my career.

If AI fulfills its promise, I might lose my job. If the bubble bursts, I'll definitely lose my job.

For now, it's where the money is. I'd like to make money now so that I won't have a completely horrible time if things ever take a turn for the worse.