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Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

For a very small number of people the hard part is writing the code. For most of us, it’s writing the correct code. AI generates lots of code but for 90% of my career writing more code hasn’t helped.

> you do end up taking on more than you can handle, just because your mob of agents can do the minutia of the tasks, doesn’t free you from comprehending, evaluating and managing the work

I’m currently in an EM role and this is my life but with programmers instead of AI agents.

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Also EM and it feels like now I have a team of juniors on my personal projects, except they need constant micromanaging in a way I never would for real people.

Does AI write 100% correct code? No, but under my watch it writes code that is more correct than anything that anyone else on the team contributed in past year or more. Even better when it is wrong I don’t have to spend literal hours arguing with it nor I have to be mindful how what I’m saying affects others feelings so I get to spend more time on actual work. All in all it’s a net positive

I never said it’s not a net positive - I said that writing more code won’t solve the problem.

> under my watch it writes code that is more correct than anything that anyone else on the team contributed in past year or more

This I don’t believe.

I agree.

I provide specific instructions, gotchas when prompting the Agent to write the code. I churn out more instructions quickly by using my voice.

Yes it makes mistakes, but it can correct them quickly as well. This correction loop takes more time if it is a human in my team working.

> For most of us, it’s writing the correct code.

I am not sure about this statement, aren't we always cutting the corners to make things ~95% correct at scale to meet deadlines with our staffing/constraints?

Most of us, who doesnt work on Linux kernel, space shuttles, and near realtime OSes, we were writing good enough code to meet business requirements

My point is that coming up with the business requirements was always the hard part (unless you’re writing a scheduler)

So you're saying AI doesn't help, and having reports is just like using AI (which you said doesn't help).

What's stopping you from becoming an IC and producing as much as your full team then? What's the point of having reports in this case?

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