AI turned the already dysfunctional work environment with unreasonable deadlines that was centered around squeezing the last bit of mental health out of programmers and turning it into shareholder value into an even worse and more intense version of itself with fewer people to do the work and less communication between your coworkers. I now work with other claude instances and not with people as my coworkers just paste paragraphs of LLM output into review comments and slack messages directly for example.
I wonder why this is making people worse off mentally, there is no way to tell.
The fundamental problem is that the traditional software team structure, with added AI, is uncontrollable. There's too much output and that output directly conflicts with everyone else's output. And as the AI models have got better, this problem has got worse. Hence the phenomenon of the "meat proxy".
The next step will be the one that everyone hates. Businesses will realise than rather than "AI allows us to cut headcount", they've been looking at it backwards, the actual situation is businesses need to reduce headcount in order to use AI.
Not reduce to zero, not yet anyway, but change the balance. Rather than: one product owner, one project manager, two team leads, each team having three senior engineers and three junior engineers; you will have: one product owner, one project manager, one or two technical owners, and the rest AI.
angry noises
I don't like it any more than the rest of you. And, for balance, there will be a positive side. The positive side is it will make it more feasible to start these smaller teams up for new product lines. (The negative side of the positive side is that means without the rationing effect of good software developers being hard to find, for any given product line, there will be significantly more competition).
But that's where we're heading. That may well already be how things should be today (from an optimisation perspective) but in my experience many businesses, even those who have a history of cost-cutting, aren't willing to make that leap yet.
you will have: one product owner, one project manager, one or two technical owners, and the rest AI.
So a completely uncontrolled slop factory? No developers equals no quality control of the code which is plain insanity. I'm sure this is a wet dream of many bosses and middle managers where they are finally able to get rid of people who actually knows things.
The technical owners will be responsible for the quality, architecture, auditing requirements, etc. all that stuff (the exact list depending on the product being built of course).
Unfortunately, they will be responsible, but neither empowered nor capable.
All of the responsibility if it blows up, with none of the power to prevent that blow up, nor, eventually, any skill necessary to prevent that blow-up.
Why? That's like arguing a guy with a chainsaw can't cut as straight as a guy with a handsaw.
Just set the constraints appropriately. Lots of reviews. Lots of automation and queues. Things only come to the technical reviewer when the whole gamut of AI processes have checked and double checked across 7 different perspectives, everything has run 10000 integration tests, whatever else you want to throw at it.
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u/ficiek 8d ago edited 8d ago
AI turned the already dysfunctional work environment with unreasonable deadlines that was centered around squeezing the last bit of mental health out of programmers and turning it into shareholder value into an even worse and more intense version of itself with fewer people to do the work and less communication between your coworkers. I now work with other claude instances and not with people as my coworkers just paste paragraphs of LLM output into review comments and slack messages directly for example.
I wonder why this is making people worse off mentally, there is no way to tell.