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Comment by wasabinator | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone tired of being told what AI is supposed to mean for the individual? As a software guy it's supposed to mean I am now a team lead of sorts. However all the people I see crowing about this never sought to become team leads in their career, nor did I.

Yet now suddenly everyone is supposed to want to become a team lead of sorts (ie. the agents becoming your team). I don't want to do that, I treat an AI agent as a pair in a pair programming unit. Nothing more, nothing less. If someone wants to treat it differently, good on them, but they have no place telling what works for thee works for me.

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I agree, nobody should be telling you, specifically, how you are going to use AI in programming.

I think a lot of people are getting caught up in the discussion about how we, generally as technologists, are going to use AI. And it is looking like the industry is moving towards what used to be programmers now being team leads or project managers of AI teams.

So it's probably best for you to try to not get involved in those discussions, and when someone says "you" assume they mean "you (generally)"?

I think it's a good idea for specialists / ICs to peek up from their work every now and then to understand how it fits into overall technical operations and the business as a whole.

Other than that... I think the managerial class is used to telling people what to do, so they have an outsized impact on "public opinion." They probably see technical work converging on agent orchestration as validation of their skills and perspective.

Management is challenging to do well and it has value, but I think viewing IC work through this lens is pure hype. Good ICs achieve relatively constant velocity throughout a project. The idea of throwing that away so they can herd digital cats for spikey output is just not a great trade to blanket apply to the whole industry.

I don't understand why people crave to assign a new role for themselves (team lead, manager). AI is a tool that augments your skill and you use it carefully. It doesn't require a change in your role. A farmer with a tractor is a farmer, not a lead. An accountant with spreadsheets is an accountant. A software engineer using a coding agent is a software engineer who has a powerful tool in their toolbox.

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