> Agents weaken the social fabric of engineering teams by reducing interpersonal communication, increasing self-reliance, and hindering skill expression.
I have a feeling that this is true and it's a bit sad.
What's been driving me nuts recently is when coworkers send me clearly AI-generated blocks of text in otherwise-human conversations. Like I'll ask in a chat window "hey, Jim, what's the difference between these two deployment pipelines," and I'll get back a block of text with markdown and headings in the style of our team's AI, and I get this sad feeling where I thought I was going to be having a conversation with a colleague, but instead my colleague was just playing as a chinese room.
If you are asking questions that can be accurately and completely by an AI, and it is something you should understand, you are asking the wrong questions of your colleagues. And they are probably happy about the AI tooling they have at their disposable to get you an answer.
If someone asks me a question (in a work setting) that they should know how to get an answer to, I think they don’t care about my time.
Do your own work first and then ask “why” or deeper understanding questions. Let’s converse over the important stuff that needs our human brains.
There's a particular sting to being passed raw, unfiltered output from the LLM hose. I think you're onto something with the mismatch in expectations (I was expecting a conversation that led to insights we might both share, and the other party was expecting to answer a question quickly without much thought).
I think there's something deeper than that, too. Almost a feeling of betrayal? I cared in part because I thought everyone else cared, too, like we were working towards a common goal. Asking a question in search of shared understanding only to be passed the modern equivalent of a LMGTFY link hurts in a very particular way. I thought they cared about this, too, but they're only trying to get the bag. I get it, times are difficult right now, but it doesn't make it hurt less.
I must be lucky or work in a great company, because I've never seen this, and I think it would be totally unacceptable for a coworker to even think about doing this. What kind of horrible company culture normalizes this kind of behavior?
I wonder if this toxic "Why are you talking to me? Just RTFM or ATFLLM (ask the fucking llm)" attitude can be filtered out during interviewing.
And the response back will be "If you could've asked the AI, why did you ask me then?"
In some cases, it may even be the appropriate response. Interrupting somebody to ask something that could be cleared up by an AI is in the same ballpark as asking them something that could be cleared up if you read the docs.
It misses the single most powerful positive though. It is incredibly fast and empowering to the point that putting up with the four horsemen is easily justified. Coding by hand is largely in the rearview mirror unless you are more interested in the craft of writing code than simply using code to get things done.
Yeah it’s fucked, our job has been destroyed from a fun team-based intellectual activity to being a button pusher. I imagine something similar happened to tailors who became factory sweatshop workers.
No point crying about it or coping that some bubble will pop and the genie will go back in the bottle. I’m pretty confident that’s not happening, though in the distant future some society will recognize that everything that can be automated should not be automated, that society will look very different and probably won’t happen in my lifetime (it will for one, I predict bring back tailors too).
So here’s my solution, leave the field. If what you enjoyed most was creative problem solving then moving to a field that enables that is the best solution. Yes the next Ruby on Rails app will involve even lesser creativity than before, but is that the situation for the next good aeroplane? Flying car? Small modular nuclear reactor. I suspect just button pushing for that won’t work nearly as well and that’s my plan anyway.
>in the distant future some society will recognize that everything that can be automated should not be automated
No, everything that can be automated SHOULD be automated, but the automation should benefit everyone instead of just the 0.1% (actually this percentile keeps getting smaller and smaller, so the percentage of people outside of the "permanent underclass" is probably even less than that now).
The problem about AI (at its current level, barring AI2027 type scenarios) is not about AI, but about the way we've organized society as a whole.
I've brought this up before, if the USSR existed today how would Soviet mathematicians react to AI? Would they be dismayed or overjoyed? You never see mathematicians acknowledge this point, but it's the crux of the issue. In our society employment justifies existence, in a society where existence is inherently justified AI would mean freedom to people instead of causing existential dread.
Yea, I got into programming because... I like programming. Not whatever the fuck this is. We've been reduced to hamsters pushing a button and getting a little pellet back, over and over.
Its inspiring to see folks putting effort into verbalizing the conflicts and unexpected side effects of working with LLMs. Our feelings really do matter at the end of the day.
But I dont know if they matter to the employers who can only see LLMs as "free milk", and developers as the "milking machine".
> But I dont know if they matter to the employers who can only see LLMs as "free milk".
Line Must Go Up.
If treating employees with dignity and giving them intellectually challenging and satisfying tasks make Line Go Up, then that's what employers will do. If making us push "Allow Claude To Do This" hundreds of times over and over makes Line Go Up more, then that's what they'll make us do. If sitting us in a factory and giving only our finger freedom of movement makes Line Go Up, that's what they'll do. If strapping us into pods like in The Matrix makes Line Go Up, that's what they'll do. If feeding us into wood chippers makes Line Go Up, that's what they'll do.
I've struggled with these feelings over the past week as I take some time away from work and the LLM madness. I miss discussions and debates about architecture and solutions to problems. I miss the curiosity and learning!
It seems LLM usage has eroded whatever facades existed and made some of us believe we were part of teams or organizations that shared these values, or culture, I'm seeing expressed in the article and comments. Perhaps _we_ were the ones hallucinating the values existed in the first place?
I don't begrudge folks who want to solve problems by any means, and not worry about the alienation or deskilling. That's their right. However, it's now clear to me that I have to make a conscious effort to express what my own values are and to build/join and organization that shares them.
> I miss discussions and debates about architecture and solutions to problems.
If you aren’t having these, then your team is using these tools wrong. AI assisted coding should open you up to more of precisely these conversations. Then use them to implement that.
It is very possible to use these tools in the wrong way. Companies that understand how to use AI will do better, those that have these 4 problems won't.
- AI should accelerate your understanding of the codebase and technical concepts.
- Skills should ensure a higher quality of code than you could create without AI
- Engineers should stay responsible for the code they product.
- The available time freed up should be used for communication, product and marketing research. The definition of an engineer who just writes code is something that's going away.
Unless something is so simple that the AI can run it autonomously. There are actually many projects like that these days. And in those cases not looking at the code like DHH does is also a viable strategy.
this is exactly it. smart companies create entire platforms with normalized, context-specific conditions and ever-evolving context for teams to operate effectively with AI in. that means artifacts, tests, ADRs, EDDs, etc. the actual engs are in-the-loop for reviewing all of the outputs, validating it against their taste and judgement, and given sufficient time to do so
seeing AI as an individualized tool for single people to labormax with just means throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing a lot of failures and incidents (much like my old workplace). it's very different from having a driven and iterative system in place with new processes and checks with clear leadership direction
My work Slack channels are ghost-towns. People are logged in, but they're never saying anything. I often find myself wondering if anyone is even working. PRs have their names on them, even the review comments are posted from _their_ accounts, but it is obvious that Claude wrote everything from the code, the unnecessarily verbose change summary, to their comments. Even their replies to my change requests start with "You're right — …".
I miss the days when the engineering Slack channels had long threads of new and interesting ways to do things, discussions of something we could do next to make work easier or fix long-standing issues. We used to build up our own knowledge of who was good at specific things, what they'd be interested in working on. Now everyone just has their slop-machine spit out every piece of a change for the entire stack without paying any attention to the details.
Fwiw I work at a company where engineers use AI heavily to produce the majority of work outputs but we also have a Slack that's just as lively as ever and plenty of evidence of humanity. Your experience sounds bad and you may be able to find a better one! It's not all bad everywhere.
How established is your team? I can see how teams that existed from the pre-LLM era can maintain their vitality, but would expect newer teams to struggle a lot more. Also, remote or in-person?
I don't want to hear about the state of your Confluence (or equivalent), if you do use it!
Also one more thing I started noticing is unnecessarily detailed comments in code, complete with issue numbers. And some of that belong in version control commit (IMHO).
The team thing is killing us right now. Everyone is just kind of silo'd with their agents and they present these entire complex units of work with no input from the rest of the team, and by then it's too late to fix.
The current "slow down" is a back-handed attempt to let the world catch up with the amount of slop that has been generated. The speed and time-to-market bill is piling up and in the next 5 years there will no humans that can understand this mess. So agentic SWE systems, need to change. Either we trust the validation layer at the end, or we take back control and also learn along the way.
> And that’s true: nobody wants to see how John prompts. There is something repulsive and fundamentally unsexy about talking to an agent. It feels fine when you are doing it, but others... ugh, get a chatroom. Their prompts are cringe; their agents are weird. Like looking at someone else’s TikTok feed.
So real. There’s still something fundamentally embarrassing about saying you used AI to do something. This leads to a pet theory of mine that most people use AI far more than they say they do.
The most disappointing conclusion of the author's article is that there is no negative business outcome. So there is no incentive from the top to stop the erosion. You don't need teams with high interpersonal communication, you don't need ownership, and your customers don't care how internally alienated your staff could be. Capitalism does not optimize for any of these things. I am pessimistic of any of these trends reversing, they will continue and intensify.
Oh god that article about Astra is so relatable. I was wondering why it was refusing to write any whitespace and was just spitting out the worst code imaginable, now I know it's not just my harness or prompts. It's truly a horrible coding model.
I'm a senior software engineer at my company. The AI slop is so bad that it's causing myself code review fatigue. The engineers are also intermediate with 3-4 years of experience.I had one guy report me to his manager because I wasn't letting him merge his PR in because of a critical bug with his code that his precious ai didn't understand.
It never does because however you frame it, AI is always the perfect scapegoat.
"Oh, I'm sorry, the bug was introduced by the AI and it made such a good case for it. Damn you claude, we'll do better next time. I'll add a code-review agent to find regressions."
this seems to be the true killer app of AI - accountability proxies. its interpersonal opium to have a third party that two ostensibly-in-conflict people can sink their negativity into.
its a major reason why military use of AI is so chilling - "look, I explicity ASKED the murderbot not to kill babies when I authorized the napalm strike on the maternity ward! BAD BOT"
My work slack used to have lots of questions. Now very less. That should be celebrated because we don’t have to depend on anyone. But I guess you can paint anything in a bad way.
I don't see the dependency amongst colleagues as a bad thing. The issues I saw when fielding those questions was folks not doing a simple search across the internal docs to answer the question themselves. Yes, LLMs make this initial search easier, and answer a majority of folks' questions.
The problem arises when it hallucinates answers. That results in colleagues operating based on invalid information, leading to bigger issues. I've seen this many times at my own company, and I simply do not know how to tell folks to be more discerning of the LLM responses while leadership is simultaneously saying do more, faster, with AI.
> That should be celebrated because we don’t have to depend on anyone.
When your work process depends on SAAS you depend on the vendor of that SAAS.
"Everyone" tells me that "noone" wants to use LLM-based code generators that you can run locally because they're so much worse than the newest ones provided by the major LLM manufacturers. If the gossip is true, then it seems like -for the foreseeable future- you're absolutely dependent on one or both of those two SAAS vendors.
Disagree on the slop point. By now the code of frontier models works well, and the need to read it is gone. The Claude word salad problem was pretty much solved with the 5.5 opus release.
The other 3 points made in article make sense though.
> By now the code of frontier models works well, and the need to read it is gone.
Like anything else, it depends on what you're working on. For small personal projects I agree, but in maintaining large scale business applications with millions of lines of code, I am still having to guide the models to reuse existing code and to be more flexible with their data structures to accommodate changing business requirements in the future.
They only see a snapshot of the world the application exists in due to their ephemeral nature, and until that is overcome, they will only be able to learn general principles and not the particular nuances of your codebase that only arise from observing how the users use it on a daily basis.
If you don't need to read the code at all, what are the engineers doing to make the other issues matter? Deskilling and alienation are still about the relationship between engineers and the code.
You still have to orchestrate these things and the wholistic system architectures, pull the slot machine handle many times to get the right thing, and review/verify the working output constantly.
That said, I think we need to be prepared for how a simple prompt like "make it faster" will work in a relatively short timeframe - and where the AI is able to adequately refactor/re-platform/be done in a way where even the architecture becomes obscure to us.
I often use simple prompts like “make it faster” and get back functionally correct commits. When I review them, I often discover that they didn’t do what I really wanted - sometimes Claude made it faster by incurring expensive costs, or doing a migration that would be risky in prod, or making a tradeoff that’s not worth it.
Perhaps I could set up a workflow to handle this without reading the code. I’ve seen people who make Claude fill out arcane templates, and then spend their time reviewing reports and tinkering with loops or whatever. But why would I want to read a TPS report about the code rather than just reading the code?
Again, the assumption that forms the crux of these objections of all of these is that we're going to hit some plateau where we are going to need humans to come back in, reskill, retake over, etc. I don't think most people are prepared for the fact that that's just a midwit problem and the AI will just keep getting better and won't need humans in the loop.
The backlash against agentic coding comes from the split that has already existed among professional software engineers. The ones who are most resistant to it are the ones for whom it has been "just a job", but the ones who love it are the ones who love solving problems. It's now possible for a small team (one person, a few) to solve truly daunting software problems with the help of agentic methods. If you were a 9 to 5er who valued craft but didn't dream about solving problems, AI is a buzz kill.
Im one of the more mid to resistant folks and this has never been just a job to me. I did take immense satisfaction from learning, deeply understanding how things work and the consist and repeatable behavior, which is just not there with ai. Especially the consist/repeatable behavior, which to me computers that behave inconsistently aren't nearly as worthwhile.
> The ones who are most resistant to it are the ones for whom it has been "just a job", but the ones who love it are the ones who love solving problems.
Wow, what a simplistic, uncalled for view of the world. This is just so ignorantly and offensively incorrect.
I really don't think anybody in these "debates", on either side, has a high horse to ride with respect to rhetoric and solemnity.
This in particular is a really silly hill to die on, because literally every debate about software development, from AI to language choice to tabs vs. spaces, eventually settles into a gravity well of asserting that all the good developers agree with your take.
> This in particular is a really silly hill to die on,
Stating that people can't love software development or solving problems because they are resistant to AI taking over their entire job is a silly hill to die on?
I really enjoy what I do, and have done, for the past 20 years. When I first wrote code I literally thought I discovered magic. In many ways, AI has re-triggered some of those feelings!
I also really care about building quality software for our customers.
And it infuriates me to no end when I see huge amounts of objectively incorrect code being written by AI, and the developer behind it stating they have no idea what it's doing, or when people say they can't solve a problem because they are out of AI tokens, etc.
But supposedly these are the people who care about solving problems? Not just that - they are the only people who care about solving problems.
You can choose to take offense if you want, but since I've seen literally the same sentiment expressed about whether people choose Emacs or vi, I have a very hard time taking that offense seriously.
Oh yeah let’s play this game. The ones resistant care about their work and pour long hours getting the details just right. The ones who love it are the ones who just want to close tickets. It’s now possible for a small team (one person, a few) to create an avalanche of slop with the help of agentic methods. If you were a 9 to 5er who valued sprint velocity but never once pondered how a monad is like a burrito back in the day, AI is the All-Mother
In my opinion, you’ve got the situation backwards. The people who see it as “just a job” are the ones who like AI because they just want to get the work done and get paid. The people who genuinely enjoy solving problems, on the other hand, don’t like AI because it takes away the problem-solving part of the job.
I have a feeling that this is true and it's a bit sad.
Do your own work first and then ask “why” or deeper understanding questions. Let’s converse over the important stuff that needs our human brains.
I think there's something deeper than that, too. Almost a feeling of betrayal? I cared in part because I thought everyone else cared, too, like we were working towards a common goal. Asking a question in search of shared understanding only to be passed the modern equivalent of a LMGTFY link hurts in a very particular way. I thought they cared about this, too, but they're only trying to get the bag. I get it, times are difficult right now, but it doesn't make it hurt less.
Apt analogy, because if you are asking questions that can be answered with the AI equivalent of a Google search, you are wasting someone else’s time.
I wonder if this toxic "Why are you talking to me? Just RTFM or ATFLLM (ask the fucking llm)" attitude can be filtered out during interviewing.
In some cases, it may even be the appropriate response. Interrupting somebody to ask something that could be cleared up by an AI is in the same ballpark as asking them something that could be cleared up if you read the docs.
No point crying about it or coping that some bubble will pop and the genie will go back in the bottle. I’m pretty confident that’s not happening, though in the distant future some society will recognize that everything that can be automated should not be automated, that society will look very different and probably won’t happen in my lifetime (it will for one, I predict bring back tailors too).
So here’s my solution, leave the field. If what you enjoyed most was creative problem solving then moving to a field that enables that is the best solution. Yes the next Ruby on Rails app will involve even lesser creativity than before, but is that the situation for the next good aeroplane? Flying car? Small modular nuclear reactor. I suspect just button pushing for that won’t work nearly as well and that’s my plan anyway.
No, everything that can be automated SHOULD be automated, but the automation should benefit everyone instead of just the 0.1% (actually this percentile keeps getting smaller and smaller, so the percentage of people outside of the "permanent underclass" is probably even less than that now).
The problem about AI (at its current level, barring AI2027 type scenarios) is not about AI, but about the way we've organized society as a whole.
I've brought this up before, if the USSR existed today how would Soviet mathematicians react to AI? Would they be dismayed or overjoyed? You never see mathematicians acknowledge this point, but it's the crux of the issue. In our society employment justifies existence, in a society where existence is inherently justified AI would mean freedom to people instead of causing existential dread.
But I dont know if they matter to the employers who can only see LLMs as "free milk", and developers as the "milking machine".
Line Must Go Up.
If treating employees with dignity and giving them intellectually challenging and satisfying tasks make Line Go Up, then that's what employers will do. If making us push "Allow Claude To Do This" hundreds of times over and over makes Line Go Up more, then that's what they'll make us do. If sitting us in a factory and giving only our finger freedom of movement makes Line Go Up, that's what they'll do. If strapping us into pods like in The Matrix makes Line Go Up, that's what they'll do. If feeding us into wood chippers makes Line Go Up, that's what they'll do.
It seems LLM usage has eroded whatever facades existed and made some of us believe we were part of teams or organizations that shared these values, or culture, I'm seeing expressed in the article and comments. Perhaps _we_ were the ones hallucinating the values existed in the first place?
I don't begrudge folks who want to solve problems by any means, and not worry about the alienation or deskilling. That's their right. However, it's now clear to me that I have to make a conscious effort to express what my own values are and to build/join and organization that shares them.
If you aren’t having these, then your team is using these tools wrong. AI assisted coding should open you up to more of precisely these conversations. Then use them to implement that.
- AI should accelerate your understanding of the codebase and technical concepts. - Skills should ensure a higher quality of code than you could create without AI - Engineers should stay responsible for the code they product. - The available time freed up should be used for communication, product and marketing research. The definition of an engineer who just writes code is something that's going away.
Unless something is so simple that the AI can run it autonomously. There are actually many projects like that these days. And in those cases not looking at the code like DHH does is also a viable strategy.
seeing AI as an individualized tool for single people to labormax with just means throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing a lot of failures and incidents (much like my old workplace). it's very different from having a driven and iterative system in place with new processes and checks with clear leadership direction
I miss the days when the engineering Slack channels had long threads of new and interesting ways to do things, discussions of something we could do next to make work easier or fix long-standing issues. We used to build up our own knowledge of who was good at specific things, what they'd be interested in working on. Now everyone just has their slop-machine spit out every piece of a change for the entire stack without paying any attention to the details.
Also one more thing I started noticing is unnecessarily detailed comments in code, complete with issue numbers. And some of that belong in version control commit (IMHO).
If you cant do that. Destroy the PR and blame the pilot.
And insert some hidden random jokes for me to keep focus»
So real. There’s still something fundamentally embarrassing about saying you used AI to do something. This leads to a pet theory of mine that most people use AI far more than they say they do.
"Oh, I'm sorry, the bug was introduced by the AI and it made such a good case for it. Damn you claude, we'll do better next time. I'll add a code-review agent to find regressions."
its a major reason why military use of AI is so chilling - "look, I explicity ASKED the murderbot not to kill babies when I authorized the napalm strike on the maternity ward! BAD BOT"
The problem arises when it hallucinates answers. That results in colleagues operating based on invalid information, leading to bigger issues. I've seen this many times at my own company, and I simply do not know how to tell folks to be more discerning of the LLM responses while leadership is simultaneously saying do more, faster, with AI.
When your work process depends on SAAS you depend on the vendor of that SAAS.
"Everyone" tells me that "noone" wants to use LLM-based code generators that you can run locally because they're so much worse than the newest ones provided by the major LLM manufacturers. If the gossip is true, then it seems like -for the foreseeable future- you're absolutely dependent on one or both of those two SAAS vendors.
The other 3 points made in article make sense though.
Like anything else, it depends on what you're working on. For small personal projects I agree, but in maintaining large scale business applications with millions of lines of code, I am still having to guide the models to reuse existing code and to be more flexible with their data structures to accommodate changing business requirements in the future.
They only see a snapshot of the world the application exists in due to their ephemeral nature, and until that is overcome, they will only be able to learn general principles and not the particular nuances of your codebase that only arise from observing how the users use it on a daily basis.
That said, I think we need to be prepared for how a simple prompt like "make it faster" will work in a relatively short timeframe - and where the AI is able to adequately refactor/re-platform/be done in a way where even the architecture becomes obscure to us.
Perhaps I could set up a workflow to handle this without reading the code. I’ve seen people who make Claude fill out arcane templates, and then spend their time reviewing reports and tinkering with loops or whatever. But why would I want to read a TPS report about the code rather than just reading the code?
AI build me a cost overview of xyz: works perfectly without ever looking at the code
AI build me unreal engine 5 level graphics, or a database, or infra at high scale: this will need some active steering for now :)
Wow, what a simplistic, uncalled for view of the world. This is just so ignorantly and offensively incorrect.
This in particular is a really silly hill to die on, because literally every debate about software development, from AI to language choice to tabs vs. spaces, eventually settles into a gravity well of asserting that all the good developers agree with your take.
Stating that people can't love software development or solving problems because they are resistant to AI taking over their entire job is a silly hill to die on?
I really enjoy what I do, and have done, for the past 20 years. When I first wrote code I literally thought I discovered magic. In many ways, AI has re-triggered some of those feelings!
I also really care about building quality software for our customers.
And it infuriates me to no end when I see huge amounts of objectively incorrect code being written by AI, and the developer behind it stating they have no idea what it's doing, or when people say they can't solve a problem because they are out of AI tokens, etc.
But supposedly these are the people who care about solving problems? Not just that - they are the only people who care about solving problems.
---
Yeah, it's offensive.