At first i was thrilled at the incredible speed of my new coding partner. Chatting with the agent felt like talknig to a real person, which blinded me a bit and made me forget many rational rules of software development. A few refactorings and many learnings later i find resonance in HN where people critizize which at the beginning i was so enthusiastic about.
I have this incredibly industrious partner, blazingly fast but mindless and oblivious. Am i the guy Hammerstein told us to avoid, or is it my Agent(or worse, is it the combination of us both)?
Imagine an industrious and stupid one with an AI Agent.
When you earnestly believe you can compensate for a lack of skill by doubling your efforts, there's no end to what you can't do.
For those too young to remember, once upon a time people went into an office to work. And sometimes HR put up motivational posters. And this spawned humorous demotiviational posters.
If you're still confused, they're memes that printed, framed, and hung on a wall.
It sounds smart, but it's autocomplete. If a group of students uses it to get ideas for an essay, the whole class will write the same essay, starring the same "Sarah Chen (no relations to Marcus Chen)".
That said, throughout history we've delegated decision making to tools. Bone reading, palm reading, face reading, dice, cards, horoscope, diviners, prophets. AI is just the latest, and 50 years from now we'll be shaking our heads at how the people in 2025 blindly trusted them.
If AI were working as well as people claim, I'd expect the opposite - work getting delivered faster than the product managers can spec it. Bugs speeding right through the SDLC process. Jira boards sitting mostly empty.
As I'm not seeing that, I'm inclined to agree that this whole industry is falling into "industrious and stupid"
You were building one house (feature) per year. After finishing the house you found a few issues (bugs). You get your plumber, electrician..etc to fix each issue.
After two years, you start building 10 houses per year. When you finish, you find twice or x times as many issues (bugs) as before. Does that mean your workrate and productivity declined or that things are going downwards?
I'm not saying AI is the joker and solving everything. I think there is a bigger picture to consider whether AI is having a good or no impact on the company you are working for. Did you release more features than before, what about MRR, CSAT,..etc?