I've been suggesting my junior colleagues recently the following mindset:
for the last 5 years you have been milking cows, that was your job, and you were great at it.
But this job ceased to exist [somewhere around August this year when Opus 5 appeared]
You have a new job: you are a barista now [and you are going to serve oat milk]
You can still manually type code, it can be a great hobby, but it is unlikely that someone will pay you a full time salary for doing it
Except your job as a software engineer has never been to write code, it has always been to produce software. Whether you do this by using AI or by rolling your head on the keyboard doesn't matter, and nobody cares.
Yes, people care. Part of the job of management is not just to define what is to be done, but how it is to be done. Let's put to bed this notion of "nobody cares how you do the job as long as it gets done" because it's hogwash.
In the early 20th century, Frederick Winslow Taylor came up with scientific management, a set of principles for determining the most efficient way to perform work tasks using systematic observation and measurement rather than tradition and "rule of thumb". The problem Taylor was trying to solve was that of soldiering, or as we call it more euphemistically today, "quiet quitting"—doing the bare minimum of work necessary to keep your job. If the best way of performing a particular task were known to management, soldiering workers could be held to account for not performing as much work as they could, effectively stealing from their employers. So since that time, business has had a vested interest in understanding the best way to perform all business tasks and making that the institutional standard.
You might think "But that doesn't apply to us in software engineering/IT. We use our smarts to solve problems." You couldn't be more wrong. Milt Bryce's insight was that the exact same management principles that applied to the manufacturing and construction industries applied to information systems as well, and treating a software shop like an industrial factory would save the company time, money, and effort.
Today, it is known that, when properly prompted, LLMs write better code than humans, much faster than humans can, and test it much more thoroughly as well. So yes, your employer absolutely cares whether you use an LLM or not. What rational person wouldn't, especially if they don't want to waste time or money? Furthermore, now that LLM use has been standardized as best practice because they are vastly more efficient, if you refuse to use LLMs on the job, you are stealing from your employer. Your boss has every right to fire you, and they'd be right to do so.
I kind of love this analogy, actually, because Taylorism and scientific management also had serious downsides for the employees involved. That kind of micromanagement leads directly to burnout, and the elimination of supposed "wasted movement", in search of repeated optimized motions, leads directly to RSI and workplace injury. But if the workers are just replaceable cogs in the machine, who cares? Certainly it boosted productivity.
> If you refuse to use LLMs on the job, you are stealing from your employer. Your boss has every right to fire you, and they'd be right to do so.
So now it's our chance to be abused to improve the bottom line.
Before Taylorism, line workers were worked to the bone. Taylor was one of the first to identify that 8-hour workdays and frequent, short breaks actually boosted productivity.
Although one of Taylor's quotes has special resonance in the AI era: "In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must come first."
Programming was a job where the man has long been first. That era is coming to a close.
It's possible I've accidentally swallowed some labor union propaganda during my education, but that's a much too rosy interpretation of Taylorism. Line workers have always been up against pressure to be worked to the bone, before and after Taylor. As you've already pointed out, workers were getting away with soldiering pre-Taylor, and then weren't immediately post-Taylor. I recall something about subsequent labor strikes. The very working conditions he helped impose would have made the ideal scenario for him to identify just how much a shorter work day and short breaks were now needed. But then, at least in the US, we didn't get the Fair Labor Standards Act for nearly three decades later.
Also, Robert Owen had Frederick Taylor beat on the 8 hour workday front by like a century. Maybe Taylorism was, in practice, one of the last straws. Or maybe it was Taylor's scientific support that helped convince the legislature an 8 hour workday was needed. Personally, I have my interpretation based on the evidence, and I don't see it boding well for software engineering as a profession in our immediate future.
Look mate, I don't like this future we're in, but I can't wishcast it away or pretend it's still mid-2025 and the slop machine is bound to collapse aaaaaany minute now. The technology is here and it's an absolute game changer. A lot of people who derived ego satisfaction from slinging code are going to find themselves handily outcompeted by a machine. And the best coders of the past—the Linuses and Carmacks of the world—are now welcoming our new robot overlords.
Except usage of AI is not only about writing code, it produces software very often from very small intent, shallow context and few bread crumbs. And you don't need to play Planning Poker with it
Why not legitimately wonder about the idea of CLOUD in general? How is GPT chat different from Gmail of MS Office holding on a lot of sensitive data.
LLM-shops are not as trustworthy as cloud providers?
> How is GPT chat different from Gmail of MS Office holding on a lot of sensitive data. LLM-shops are not as trustworthy as cloud providers?
Every LLM company is built on taking a fast-and-loose approach to intellectual property.
Why should the purported legal protections on my LLM conversations be any different to the purported legal protections on those pirated ebooks, scraped newspaper websites, scraped photos, and suchlike?
I agree, the LLM market has a shady notion in the root of its story. It's like when you go to a circus, and you realize how much of it is built around suffering of tamed animals
Some of LLM-shops have higher standards, and maybe because of that their progress is slower (example: Google)
> LLM-shops are not as trustworthy as cloud providers?
All of the major cloud providers are LLM shops now, it seems...
But yes, I've been concerned about this for a long time too. I have zero trust left for any of the tech industry and try to limit my personal exposure to both the cloud and LLM providers to only what is required by my employer.
What got us here won't get us there perhaps? Can you tell why open source started to exist in first place? Wasn't that a way to crowdsource manual labour, and this reason is not valid anymore, as cost of this spiecif labour is near zero?
Depends on the problem those million pages solved. If it meant the government sent me a prepopulated tax form that I could just sign if I agreed with the numbers and be done - yes, I would be extremely excited.
Then you can do the whole file process. For most people the government gets all the data. The filing process is purposely keeping tax companies in business today.
The point of my response is that the analogy was broken without saying what adding those pages could provide.
Right, but now there are a million extra pages in the filing process. Many more companies would be kept in business to deal with the extra garbage!
The analogy isn't broken. Your objection didn't really make sense, because adding pages to the tax code makes the tax code strictly more complicated. Your response just ignored the case where that complexity actually matters.
I feel encouraged to upgrade, because the more I can do with coding agents the more I am getting limited: cloud coding agents are running on shitty VMs (no GPU), my laptop is melting down whenever I try to do a few more things at once.
10 months ago I would agree, but today agent means something else: a workload, and the battle is on: who will host more of those workloads and do other kind of cross sell and upsell in this environment.
"Deploy" section of that article makes the difference.
Each time I recreate an old game I quickly realize that the gameplay which entertained me as a child/teenager is rather unbearable for me as an adult. HoMM is this type of game.
I still enjoy Morrowind. And I've replayed Ultima IV, although it does get grindy at one point. (For one of my play-throughs as a kid, I got the grindy part and simply boosted everybody to level 8 by editing the save file.)
But, as an adult, I don't really make the time for games anymore. I've been sitting on Baldur's Gate 3 (maybe an hour or two in) for years.
That's my point: as a child/teenager I could dive deep into those worlds, and fill the gaps in graphics/gameplay with my imagination, and just like yours my time was pretty much unlimited. Today I feel alergic towards any kind of game that feels like a job, and requires work and some effort.
HoMM from adult perspective is this type of game, it's not a hop-in hop-out type of experience, it's fully opposite.
I remember using a hex editor (Copy II+ Sector Editor?) to max out both characters and items in the Apple version of Ultima III & IV. The glory days of green and amber
Gdynia actually looks and feels like a city, it was designed to be such, and built from scratch. Think startup that actually became a rocketship!
Architecturally it is very close to some parts of Warsaw, and has similar vibe.
I started to think differently about web search for agents, instead of traditional index, I would prefer to have an agentic WALKER that literally walks through pages and finds out whats needed, even if seeded with some initial web search.
I needed to find a word on a wayback archived website. Could not. So I scraped the waybackmachine pages to .md… and found it that way… sorry Archive.org
I used 50% in just one task(3d gamedev) on AI Pro in Antigravity desktop. It is not my daily driver anyways, but it was nice to see that it is actually performing and completing the task.
You can still manually type code, it can be a great hobby, but it is unlikely that someone will pay you a full time salary for doing it
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