It's fine to have preferences. The biggest problem with bikeshedding is the time spent (wasted) debating. But you don't have to debate the AI, you just tell it your preferences, and ideally encode them so that they are repeatable.
I am equating the nerve that develops in people that get lost bikeshedding (wasting time on inconsequential parts of the problem) with fighting an llm on inconsequential implementation details.
We most certainly agree: what matters should always be the actual requirements (functional, security, performance, etc.) You can't bikeshed an important topic. Everything else is implementers decision. In my experience an experienced engineer understands the difference and trusts implementers to make the decisions that they do own.
You use the intentionally vague word "implementers" to abstract whether you're delegating to a human or to an AI. But the key point is that these are not the same thing. If I'm delegating to a person, that person is the "implementer". If I'm using an AI to generate an implementation, I am still the "implementer", it is merely a computer program working on my behalf.
I understand the boundaries of ownership and responsibility. That’s why I can tell you if you are spending inordinate amounts of time correcting AI code then you’re doing something wrong. Either write the code yourself or reassess your ownership boundaries. You’re acting as a manager of a team of agents in an agentic coding paradigm. Managers don’t tell me how to write code.
I think this entire analogy about being a manager of a team of agents that is in vogue is completely misguided. Have I always been the manager of a team of bash scripts? No. These tools are way more capable, but they are still just tools that I'm using to do my own work, they are not people that I'm delegating responsibility to.
Why are we even arguing then? You and I agree. Did I ever say "don't share a single preference with the AI"? You set the guardrails and preferences and the AI follows them. This is how it's always worked so it's reasonable for me to assume that people "fighting the AI" have already done this and are being overly pedantic about the output. Otherwise it wouldn't be eating up inordinate amounts of time...
> Have I always been the manager of a team of bash scripts? No.
No. You're not even remotely close here. Let's revisit this once you've figure out how to have a team of bash scripts implement 100k lines of code and build entire systems in 2 weeks based on high level instructions and requirements shared in context and prompts. You have responsibility at a different level and scale in an AI native workflow.
But I think we have a real disagreement about the second thing. You don't "have responsibility at a different level and scale in an AI native workflow", you're still using tools. I understand that what you're saying is that it's such a difference in scale that it is a difference in kind. But I don't agree. I'm fundamentally at odds with this entire framing of ai agents as a team that is being managed. I don't like any of the anthropomorphizing of ai tools. It's fine if it's just an analogy, but people take it way too seriously as a real thing IMO. I fully recognize that I'm out of step with the prevailing discourse on this, but it's a genuine disagreement, I'm not confused about what other people think.
I think most people have felt that way before. Only way forward is to practice with the new tool (=