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Comment by ForHackernews | Hacker News Reader

The dream of the middle class IT drone is to become the executive Office Man: he shouts at his PA and she books his flights.

Now AI can provide a simulacrum of his fondest aspiration, to be too important to click through booking.com and make someone else do it for him.

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Well, I've taken to describing the best responsible use of AI to help your work as though you have an executive assistant, so I can see why people would come to that conclusion. I don't tend to think of booking flights for that though, I tend to think of asking them to gather information and present it to me so I can review it for whether it's appropriate to include, probably with changes, in whatever I'm working on. Perhaps an executive assistant isn't the right term for that, or perhaps it's just that different people and different industries have vastly different ideas of how to make use of an executive assistant. I don't know enough to answer that.

Been a middle-class IT drone much of my adult life. This is not my dream. In fact I just realized that one reason I don't like AI dev tools is because they turn me into the kind of dickhead manager I despise: one who doesn't understand the code or the nature of the work involved, just gives orders on what needs to be built and complains when it doesn't work.

I fix it by micromanaging it. Which class, method, function, module - I dictate the low level structure and features. I dump my all my hard earned coding opinions in a profoundly crafted markdown file.

What helps me adjust is what I call Thanos-coding: trying to get AI to do the thing with contexts and agents and SDD and whateverthefuck, and if it gets tangled on its own shoelace say "Fine. I'll do it myself." Alternatively: making its mistakes disappear with a snap of my fingers and starting over.

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