From the article "And yet these tools have opened a world of creative potential in software that was previously closed to me, and they feel personally empowering. "

I keep seeing things like this, about "democratization" etc. But coding has been essentially free to learn for about 25 years now, with all the online resources and open source tools anyone can use.

Is this just a huge boon to those too lazy to learn? And what does that mean for later security and tech debt issues?

> 8. People may become busier than ever

this is so true and the opposite of what was expected

Agreed on the point that people will become busier. It’s the Jevons Paradox in its purest form: increasing the efficiency of a resource leads not to saving it, but to increasing its consumption.

We used to skip building internal tools or complex integrations because it was expensive, now it's cheap so naturally the business wants everything. Future engineers won't be writing code so much as orchestrating the chaos generated by agents. We won't stop working, but the workload is definitely going up

This is an excellent article. I resonated with all ten of his points.This section at the end particularly made sense.

"Regardless of my own habits, the flow of new software will not slow down. There will soon be a seemingly endless supply of AI-augmented media (games, movies, images, books), and that’s a problem we’ll have to figure out how to deal with. These products won’t all be “AI slop,” either; some will be done very well, and the acceleration in production times due to these new power tools will balloon the quantity beyond anything we’ve seen."

nice write up of things that are only obvious if you spend time with AI. pretty much everything applies to non-agentic AI work, code or not, as well, if you are aiming beyond average quality and conventional design, that is. people who give up somewhat early won't give up much later just because they use AI or teach an AI agent.

but the article is mostly also what people not in the field or tangentially related expect. it's here but that big thing isn't.

I could say I dabbled with woodworking but I really just used a chainsaw to cut down some trees, make slabs and then used drill and screws to construct the cheapest, fastest MVP of a piece of furniture that I used until the shed burned down. But that's not woodworking, not really.

"AI coding agents" is just an autoiterating chat of/with a large coding model, that you still have to iterate over, which is as obvious as an apprentice in a woodworking shop doing a lot--if not all of the work--alone until the meister points out all the mistakes and lets him do it all over again.

> I was soon spending eight hours a day during my winter vacation shepherding about 15 Claude Code projects at once

If you are a "computer person", spending 8h a day on multiple projects is normal, although 15 is, IMO, way too freaking much but I'm ADHD and not really a computer person. While I run dozens of narratives in parallel all the time, I only "shepherd" and iterate over a handful of them in 'flexible' time intervalls.

The reason for the burnout might be, and I can relate due to my ADHD, the following:

> Due to what might poetically be called “preconceived notions” baked into a coding model’s neural network (more technically, statistical semantic associations), it can be difficult to get AI agents to create truly novel things, even if you carefully spell out what you want.

The expectation to create something "truley novel" based on ideas that aren't truly novel (yet, ...what?) is weird enough, but then expecting that an AI coding agent, an apprentice, will make it novel even though the entire thing basically already exists and the novelty makes no sense conceptually until the core elements are separated

> a UFO (instead of a circular checker piece) flying over a field of adjacent squares,

is quite analogues to semi-functional ADHD people who believe they will get at least some of their ideas out if they "work" or dream on all all them. It can work, but you have to separate concerns, which, in case of ADHD people, is becoming functional, meaning don't consume stuff that impede body and brain, do stuff to eliminate bio-physical distractions and to keep hormonal and neural moral high at most times, and only then work, and in the case of AI coding agents it means to separate concepts that are programmatically/mathematically/linguistically intertwined and only then define mechanics and features within or beyond the individual or combined constraints.