> I suspect that many of the loudest voices pushing back against AI coding tools never practiced programming as a hobby or saw it as especially fun, and the fact their job is changing won't make them start now.
Never thought Justin Searls would say that. So I reread the whole comment over and over again, and it clicked.
I liked building and making stuff work. I also didn't mind and often enjoyed coordinating with (good) clients, managers, or other engineers. I didn't love being a manager and requested a few years ago to go back to an IC role.
That said, I think I didn't like being a manager because of the turnaround time and/or quality of people I managed (partially due to my blind spots in managerial skills, at least in some cases). I improved but it wasn't worth the headache for me at the time.
With agents, I feel some of that pain again, but it also fixes some of the problems I had with it; relatively consistent quality and I find that I can lower my bar of communication with an LLM (I'm not writing in public to a real colleague) while simultaneously getting a lot more out of it, and it tends to not misconstrue what I've written.
I keep going back and forth between loving it and pining for being an old fashioned IC.
All that said, I really enjoy the puzzle of programming, in ways that I couldn't really always do at work -- "it's good enough", etc... I've done it in free time this year but it's hard not to view it as a waste of time now.
Not sure where I'm going with this besides expressing my current thoughts and somewhat agreement. /rant
I enjoy puzzles as much as the next guy. But I can just pick up a crossword or sudoku or something and get that mental stimulation elsewhere. The thing I always found vexing about programming was that the puzzle-solving was a prerequisite to getting anything done. Now that the two are decoupled, I'm a lot happier.
Pro-tip: it costs very, very few tokens to have an agent (harness) sleep a random amount of hours between each toggle. Just tell it to. It's not burning tokens on `sleep`, just to call it.
It might not hit input cache at that rate but better than a block or ban. Keep the context window small.
It's almost like C has keywords and pragmas for your compiler too. Neat!
It's really not different. This is just backward compatible (e.g. for intellisense). Honestly better than a #define that I have to declare to get a build going in a lesser C compiler (worst case, looking at you Apple).
> The most successful businesses are those that deeply understand something about their customers, about how to sell to their buyers. The most has never mattered. An army of agents doing endless busywork is not the path to success.
You're talking about the best businesses. Arguably the article is talking about the mean of the "startup" tranche of businesses.
Google isn't a SaaS. That's (is or is tangential to) the kind of businesses this article is referring to. And they make decent money, they just aren't a unicorn that didn't die.
Fallout is great example of a subset of their IP making a huge turnaround. Halo is not.
To sell all the IP at once is grave mistake. They would easily make more on separate deals. Netflix not taking it all at 800m seems like a mistake.
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