I wish I could care more about what the computer wants (because it’s fun). I couldn’t care less what the product demands.

> Business people can just directly convey what they want to the AI. Today, yes, this often leads to a mess. But for how long?

As long as “business” people don’t wanna do the job and prefer to pay for it. It’s like, you can fix your own sink pipes if you follow youtube video tutorials long enough… it’s just usually not worth the effort, and so you pay someone to do it.

Business people, I imagine, don’t want to deal with software at all.

But isn’t “grooming” the hardest part? To know the details means to know the codebases behind. So you do discovery, read code, ask people, check db tables, and then once you figure it out, you write a doc with the proposed solution. It gets reviewed and then you code it.

I definitely need AI help for the discovery part… so it always starts with a simple “I need to do X”

You don't need to read the code manually line by line to do that. But yes, you need to know what you're doing.

I would replace the eng. managers

> “the AI did it" to be any acceptable excuse.

It will be depending on how much you paid. My bet is that in the near future normal people (like most of us) will be attended by AI in pretty much everywhere: the bank, the hospital, shops, hotels, etc.

You will need to pay extra premium to be attended by a human being. Actually that’s what’s been happening to the ultra rich since a very long time ago (e.g. a millionaire doesn’t book an appointment by using their phones, they ask their assistant to book for them; they don’t go online shopping, they get people do the shopping for them, etc)

AI as technology is cool and all, as cool as GCC or Linux or HTTP. The thing I don’t like about AI is that 99% of the time we talk about vendor-locked AI (claude, codex) and 99% of the time we use those. So you need to pay to use the models. You depend on the big corporations. It’s not anymore, I clone this repo and let’s explore freely.

Nah, LLM models are already the new compilers. A commodity only engineers know how to use (in the context of software engineering in production environments)

Out of context, but to address "AI will replace engineers".

Recently discussed something about economy/investing with a friend while at work at a slaughterhouse. I really didn't want him to get scammed buying crypto. So, used ChatGPT to find some sources in Somali, a 3 videos with short description why it's worth watching. Intro into investing, intro about cryptocurrencies and about buying them. Had the text shortened down to 3 pretty short paragraphs, not more than twice this post.

He's a smart guy, but only went to primary Qur'an school. Doesn't read or such, mostly consumes internet in form of video/media. He couldn't read those 3 paragraphs, it was too long. Or rather, it wasn't just 3 paragraphs, it was a lot to read.

Maybe we're already dividing into murlocs and the surface dwellers?

I think things would take longer to get done (and that’s fine for me tbh).

The main usage of AI for me is to do discovery: if I am working on service A that has a dozen other services as dependencies, then I clone all the repos, point the agent at them, and start to ask questions. I double check ofc. But without the agent I would be back to manual grep code and git logs, asking around, etc… that takes longer and you may miss things

Tip: include pictures of your machine. Not sure if I’m alone in this, but I love to see other people’s setups