Summarizer

Something I like about our weird new LLM-assisted world is the number of people I know who are coding again, having mostly stopped as they moved into management roles or lost their personal side project time to becoming parents. AI assistance means you can get something useful done in half an hour, or even while you are doing other stuff. You don't need to carve out 2-4 hours to ramp up any more. If you have significant previous coding experience - even if it's a few years stale - you can drive these things extremely effectively. Especially if you have management experience, quite a lot of which transfers to "managing" coding agents (communicate clearly, set achievable goals, provide all relevant context.)

So much this. The act of having the agent create a research report first, a detailed plan second, then maybe implement it is itself fun and enjoyable. The implementation is the tedious part these days, the pie in the sky research and planning is the fun part and the agent is a font of knowledge especially when it comes to integrating 3 or 4 languages together.

Now we ALL be project managers! Hooray!

Yes! I’ve seen this myself, folks moving back into development after years or decades.

The head chefs at most restaurants delegate the majority of details of dishes to their kitchen staff, then critique and refine.

This approach seems to have worked out for both Warhol and Chihuly.

I would argue that you technically did not cook it yourself - you are however responsible for having cooked it. You directed the cooking.

Why is the head chef called the head chef, then? He doesn’t “cook”.

"head chef" is a managerial position but yes often they can and do cook.

It's called being a systems analyst or product manager. Upskill into these roles (while still accepting individual contributor pay) or get left behind.

I'm sorry, "upskill"? The roles you mentioned don't require any more advanced skills than those required for software development—just a different set of skills. And an IC is not "left behind" if those roles don't interest them. What a ridiculous thing to say. A systems analyst or product manager is not a natural progression for someone who enjoys software development.

> Over the past two decades, I’ve worked with a lot of talented people: backend developers, frontend developers, marketers, leaders, and more. I can lean on those experiences, fall back on how they did things, and implement their methods with AI. Will that really work? You interacted with the end product, but you don't have the experience and learned lessons that those people had. Are you sure this isn't the LLM reinforcing false confidence? Is the AI providing you with the real thing or a cheap imitation and how can you tell?

It’s because business demand speed and shipping over other concerns. We had to fight hard for proper quality controls in the face of the LLM coding assistance boom where I work. These are great tools but they have limits and can lead to poor engineering hygiene quite quickly. It took a major issue being attributed to having too much trust in these tools before we were able to enforce better hygiene with them