One of my favourite rules: perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. This is invaluable to writing. So much text from an LLM feels superfluous, like I could've said the same wall of text with just a few sentences. Writing is tightly coupled with thinking: refining thoughts, arguments, ideas, discarding them, mulling over them. LLM text always raises this nagging question in my mind: am I reading what you think, or what your agent parroted back and you accepted?
There is no way that solely talking to an agent induces the same depth or amount of thinking than when you are actually writing for yourself. It just takes too much discipline to not offload your thinking.
And the discipline gets attacked even more when all you read is LLM text. For example in code reviews there is no noticeable value in answering LLM generated review comments. I remember taking great care answering human-written reviews comments with much thought to either further build on their suggestions or to forward knowledge about the system when I had to defend a particular change.
Now, some bot will read my carefully written response and forgets about it. There is no value anymore.
No wonder that our pull request comments feel like the dead internet theory right now.
I am absolutely pro AI assisted coding. But communication between humans HAS to stay human. I am currently experiencing the opposite and it’s bad.
Of course you can’t generalize this behavior to everyone. There will most certainly be people who can be disciplined and I try to be one of them.
But I don’t know where to draw the line yet. It’s difficult to decide what parts you are offloading and what parts you keep for your own brain. Because theoretically you can offload nearly everything when you get a well-defined ticket and just give it to an agent.
Maybe it’s also just me who is having a hard time staring at LLM generated texts all day and missing the past brainstorming, pair programming or “just talking about the project” sessions with colleagues and managers.
I fear that we are moving in the direction of silos again with lots of gate keeping as everyone has their own little rubber duck to talk to now.
Systems from today (if not worked on with discipline) will be no more than an agglomeration of features glued together. But as you said, guess our fight to fight will be to be that disciplined person.
> No wonder that our pull request comments feel like the dead internet theory right now.
This is the worst part of fully AI-generated code and automated reviews. It's so unnatural, and slightly anti-social, yet I can't figure out what the solution is when you have to ship features at the pace expected the average SWE nowadays.
Right? This one really hurts to see. I remember just a year ago we all used agents to help us code, but the end result of a session was still a human-made piece that other humans looked at and that we discussed about together.
And because we were talking to colleagues we wanted to make sure that we don’t waste their time. So we kept PR descriptions precise and understandable, we created small reviewable PRs and we wrote review comments that didn’t span half of your page.
Everything felt like it had value to someone.
But I agree with the current pace push it’s nearly impossible to do it any different. And honestly I don’t understand the rush. At least at our company I can’t discern any speed-up yet. Yes, more lines of code are written but features still take very long. It often just moves the work to a different stage in the process.
I am writing too much but I can’t stop thinking about all of this day and night. Sometimes even questioning whether the standards I want to live up to are maybe set too high for this day and age…
The second one, for sure. Heavy AI users who claim it's only for expressing their ideas more quickly/effectively are lying to themselves. They are using AI to think.
