I’m not a Luddite, and the thing I most need at work now is a mid-seniority dev to support me. I don’t care if their name is Tanner, Prateek, Claude or Luna, I’ll take the help, except the meat-based variant is, IME, near impossible to hire (beats me - so many devs in the market, but the CV stack is deeply underwhelming, and the interviews only worse).
But every time I try to use AI agents - and frankly I only use the frontier ones as work pays for tokens - it’s basically what the author describes. Lots of random changes. The model happily saying it is doing X while also doing !X and also Y and Z, and sometimes gets stuck in some weird loop. Last time (admittedly not a frontier model but not far off) it wrote a Python script which would write another text file, with the contents defined as a concatenation of chr(XX) characters. That was enough.
Fixing or reviewing all this nonsense, or babysitting the model line by line takes more time than doing the damn thing myself.
What makes it worse is the cadence of babysitting an LLM is really awkward. Again, I don’t know what Im doing wrong. But reviewing things every 10 mins destroys my attention span. Even a junior dev is better in this regard - give them something to work on, describe what you need, review 1-3x / day for a week, and you hope to get somewhere. Even if it takes a long time, it’s not a major effort, so long as you’re ok with the latency. LLMs are the opposite - low latency, high noise. Lots of little efforts frequently, and all requiring full attention - because it’s easy to miss the little “rm -rf /” or other Easter egg Claude left.
So in short, it matches the behavior TFA describes. And yet lots of people see to be able to derive a lot of value out of it.
I have a lot of success writing medium length snippets with it, in a conversational style. Sort of up to 500-1000 LOC in things that aren’t challenging. Or building a scaffolding for a webpage. Or a non judgmental, zero lag replacement to SE/SO. But a mid senior dev ain’t that.
It’s not just a rant, any suggestions welcome.