Ah, management without managing. Its depressing and engaging at the same time. Depressing because palace intrigue is exhausting and fraught with peril. Engaging because I love explaining things to people and watching everything click into place for them (see the 1 of 10k xkcd comic).
Most people I know don't write any code with agents, 90ish percent is still written by hand. I'm personally still trying to figure out where to fit them into my workflow: there's not much boilerplate to write as well known frameworks and libraries had already taken care of the heavy lifting, templates for major project types cut down on the initial startup overhead, and all of the project planning is done upfront with business partners.
Despite my ethical issues with AI, I am using it for a handful of personal projects so I am at least keeping up with what the frontier models are doing and I'm quite impressed with them for doing reverse engineering (they need a lot of hand holding, but I've been able to knock out months of trial and error pretty quickly).
That being said, I'm still perplexed when people state they're getting huge gains from them in terms of knocking out boilerplate, or helping them plan out the project. I was under the impression that the former was a solved problem, and the latter was a requirement of being a decent engineer.
It want solved. There was some generic boilerplate that was added to IDEs but it wouldn't be project specific. It wasn't able to look at patterns within your own codebase and repeat them.
>and the latter was a requirement of being a decent engineer.
Most software projects are too big to fit in one engineers head. Having AI be able to research what the relevant code is, how it works, what race conditions exist, what pitfalls or other things you may run into saves a lot of time in regards to planning.
> It want solved. There was some generic boilerplate that was added to IDEs but it wouldn't be project specific. It wasn't able to look at patterns within your own codebase and repeat them.
I left out some expository, apologies. For example, I rely pretty heavily on using VSA as a way to keep things self contained and thus created templates for each different functionality type (background worker, crud action, etc) where they already have the logging/database connection/code flow pattern, I just need to shove in whatever business logic is needed. Now, that logic is the hard part and would require me to explain it in excruciating detail to Claude, or write it out by hand, but it take the same amount of time either way.
If, as a member of the c-suite, I find that a noticeable percentage of my company's workforce isn't "helping to explorer a current trend" then either they know something I don't or I haven't given them the time/methods by which to explore.
The latter is actually the more pertinent item, as I've seen several times that an initiative get rolled out by leadership, some teams have free time to play around and use it, and other teams have so much on their plate that they're barely able to keep their heads above water, let alone take on another experiment. If someone is worried about getting a project knocked out by end of month/quarter/year in order to keep their job, they're not going to mess about.
Now, that's a leadership failure, but it happens more often than not.
What is everyone shifting to, and at what scale? I can see moving to breaking down tasks in separate markdown docs for a small(ish) startup, but working at a company of more then say 1k or so requires a bit more infrastructure to deal with the cross cutting concerns (compliance/legal, pm's, leadership, etc). I'm at a reasonably sized F500 and Jira is the default, despite how much all of us despise it, mainly because it ticks all of the boxes for aforementioned areas.
Yea, I’m just consulting with small projects. A year ago Jira felt like the default, last month I learned about Linear.
I’ve just been surprised lately at how often it isn’t the first thing mentioned. I came from a Fortune 500 and Jira was mostly hated there as well. I still think its foothold is so big that it’ll be a long time before anyone goes through the effort to migrate. I’d personally rather live with it than try to replace it.
Most people in tech still think people who are getting laid off deserve it and that they themselves are immune to it. People won’t change until they experience it first hand.
I was discussing this with one of my counterparts today, and we both agreed that writing the code is the easy part, and actually knowing what to do / getting requirements sorted out / working with our compliance team are the hard parts. That being said, I'm in a pretty highly regulated industry so it just might be that.
Envisioning what should exist is always the hardest part.
If LLMs provide substantial material to be able to produce what one envisions faster, that is great. But LLMs will not be doing the envisioning. Most humans already are poor at that. Hence why there are very few real 'visionaries' in history.
Envisioning always requires deep thinking. If LLMs eat away at a humans ability to sit and think, this will make envisioning solutions harder. So you'll see more stuff produced, but largely more crap.
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