Cory Doctor’s recent book on Centaurs and Reverse Centaurs is worth reading.
The core idea of that is that centaurs are a human top and machine / alien body, they’re effectively augmented humans with all this technology to help them excel.
Reverse Centaurs are human bodies and machine / alien tops, where the humans are just checking the work of systems and are subservient to them. He points out that that’s one of the fundamental differences between Amazon and the Postal Service is that in the case of Amazon drivers, they basically function as a reverse Centaurs where they are just an appendage of the delivery car, tracked and managed by that car, to do the tasks the car can’t do on its own.
Imagine being a horse waking up with a human torso and micropenis.
very interesting concept. another example might be railway drivers who are merely appendices to the vehicle. the vehicle largely drives itself, the driver is mostly there to check tickets, answer passenger’s questions, etc.
We used to have elevator operators
One of my most played songs last year.
lol sure they are.
They’re desperately trying to pump this AI shit up with these fake stories before they go public
Investors really are dumber demographic than MAGA.
Well, they are, but not for the takeaway the article gives. The article is so close, but fails to extract the accurate conclusion.
First are what he calls the “lazy” engineers — workers who rely heavily on AI to write code, answer questions, prepare updates, and complete tasks with minimal engagement.
Then there are the “craftsmen,” experienced engineers who bear the burden of understanding, reviewing, and fixing the growing flood of AI-generated code.
This is accurate. You have a set of “developers” who just need to make a good showing on the telemetry, whether it’s “tokens used” and/or prominence in commit activity. They are not held to account on actual productive outcomes, just that they supervised a credible volume of AI activity. If the AI generates code and tests and the AI is satisfied that the code passes the tests, then their job is done. You have another set of developers that have to live with the nightmarish consequences of the first, because they just generated a pile of shit that would have been better not to exist at all.
‘The craft they loved is dead’
Wrong takeaway, the craft is alive, but mismanagement is diluting it with bullshit.
Incidentally, this isn’t new, but the magnitude is new. I have had significant segments of my career consumed by management insisting that I somehow make the bottom dollar offshored developers “productive”, and similar pattern, if they “looked busy”, management was happy, and management didn’t care about whether the work was useful, because frankly they couldn’t tell. They could tell if some volume of “stuff” was happening and they just settled on that, and if the “stuff” alienated customers, well that was the fault of those “craftsmen” for failing to properly manage the output from the “lazy” engineers.
Software engineer, here. Yep, the burnout is real. I consider myself fortunate, however; with the skyrocketing cost of AI, my employer has been urging us to do as much as possible by hand lately to cut back on token usage.
I think that’s pretty much where the entire industry will go soon.
I really hope you’re right. My company is still in the “use as much as possible” phase, and my manager is quoting Jensen about “you need to use half your salary on tokens!”. I’m looking for other work, but everyone is looking for vibe coders at the moment it seems…
I’ve gone from really loving my job, to hate my life.
Mo Bitar had a bit of advice that I think is applicable here: Lie. Claim to be an extreme 10x vibe whatever. Put “AI enablement” (whatever the fuck that means) in your LinkedIn profile. And wherever you get hired, commit to using enormous amounts of tokens as they require.
Then just… write code. Oh, definitely use the LLMs, too, but not for anything important. Set them to work writing BASH scripts or something. Get them burning through tokens to summarize all the corporate documentation you can find. Have agents creating agents to test the output of other agents and report to more agents on what the agents are doing. Meanwhile, do real work. Make sure that for every PR, you have the AI do one thing on it, to give it that code-slop shine.
Sucks that this is where we’re at, but it is what it is.
I’ve had LLM generate so many web sites about various random animals I’ve crammed into a prompt. No one wants web sites about those random animals, but my management is pleased at my token utilization.
Can do my real work and get praised for my actual productivity, and burn the tokens to get praised on AI adoption…
Clever! And when sanity starts reasserting itself at your company, you can claim you’re focusing on saving the company money by reducing your token usage and just… make fewer animal slop websites.
Huh. Maybe I will have a shot at getting a job… Oh, wait, I have 35 years experience, am over 50 and have been unemployed for 16 months. Never mind.
I gave up the humiliating shit show called a job search 3 months ago, and frankly my last job killed any interest in software development anyway.
It’s all idiots telling professionals they’re wrong and incompetent while blaming them for the ongoing production failures we solved and explained every month for a year but still can’t get the code past review because “it does too much”. 30 fucking lines of code “does too much”. Pompous morons.
We’re a threat of competence, and they’re excising us relentlessly. I will laugh bitterly as I watch the soon to be torrent of fiascos and lamentations these idiots spout while still finding a way to blame software engineers.
I’m sorry that happened to you. I’ve also seen it happen to a lot of very good engineers I’ve known over the years. It’s truly insane. I know some people who’ve had to dip into their 401k accounts early just to keep their heads above water, and it’s going to be an economy-wide disaster soon.
Ours is trying to cut everything to the bone to avoid admitting AI is not the future.
It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad.
however; with the skyrocketing cost of AI, my employer has been urging us to do as much as possible by hand lately to cut back on token usage.
and the Slop companies are still losing money… the end result still seems to be more expensive, crappier code, yet most companies seem to be so nearsighted they are not jumping into the spike pit face first
As a freelance dev it’s not quite as bad now but it’s insane to see that some of my clients think I got replaced by a machine now only to show me a buggy vibe coded mess of an app that is poorly designed and works half the time at best. I like some of the LLM tools but it’s important to understand their abilities and limitations especially in regards to future capabilities as there are hard limits to how capable they can become.
Way too many people think the tools are smart because they can „talk“ and these same people do not understand any of the underlying tech.
Some of my clients send ChatGPT written instructions now that are missing half the context of what I‘m actually doing.
I call it “Turing’s Revenge” where, once the bot can pass the Turing test, we find out the hard way if humans are intelligent… and we appear to have a lot of failed models, mostly in management.
do you ever indulge with malicious compliance?
I almost clicked the link until I saw the domain name.
Educate me?
Business Insider articles are generally trash content. They choose provocative headlines and hot-button issues to boost engagement, but once you’re on the site, there’s not actually that much to engage with.
Truth. Same with benzinga and Yahoo finance. Most are actually adverse for gold in disguise.
I used to work for a clickbait factory, so I’m familiar with the hallmarks.
Ahh so much of that nowadays. Probably AI written too, ironically.
Today software engineers and tomorrow software engineers minus one.
