[hollowturtle]

I don't understand how Agents make you feel productive. Single/Multiple agents reading specs, specs often produced with agents itself and iterated over time with human in the loop, a lot of reviewing of giant gibberish specs. Never had a clear spec in my life. Then all the dancing for this apperantly new paradigm, of not reviewing code but verifying behaviour, and so many other things. All of this to me is a total UNproductive mess. I use Cursor autocomplete from day one till to this day, I was super productive before LLMs, I'm more productive now, I'm capable, I have experience, product is hard to maintain but customers are happy, management is happy. So I can't really relate anymore to many of the programmers out there, that's sad, I can count on my hands devs that I can talk to that have hard skills and know-how to share instead of astroturfing about AI Agents

[wiether]

> Never had a clear spec in my life.

To me part of our job has always been about translating garbage/missing specs in something actionnable.

Working with agents don't change this and that's why until PM/business people are able to come up with actual specs, they'll still need their translators.

Furthermore, it's not because the global spec is garbage that you, as a dev, won't come up with clear specs to solve technical issues related to the overall feature asked by stakeholders.

One funny thing I see though, is in the AI presentations done to non-technical people, the advice: "be as thorough as possible when describing what you except the agent to solve!". And I'm like: "yeah, that's what devs have been asking for since forever...".

[hollowturtle]

With "Never had a clear spec in my life" what I mean is also that I don't how something should come out till I'm actually doing it. Writing code for me lead to discovery, I don't know what to produce till I see it in the wrapping context, like what a function should accept, for example a ref or a copy. Only at that point I have the proper intuition to make a decision that has to be supported long term. I don't want cheap code now I want a solit feature working tomorrow and not touching it for a long a time hopefully

[maqnius]

In my real life bubble, AI isn't a big deal either, at least for programmers. They tend to be very sceptical about it for many reasons, perceived productivity being only one of them. So, I guess it's much less of a thing than you would expect from media coverage and certain internet communities.

[hollowturtle]

Are you hiring?

[elAhmo]

> Never had a clear spec in my life.

Just because you haven't or you work in a particular way, doesn't mean everyone does things the same way.

Likewise, on your last point, just because someone is using AI in their work, doesn't mean they don't have hard skills and know-how. Author of this article Mitchell is a great example of that - someone who proved to be able to produce great software and, when talking about individuals who made a dent in the industry, definitely had/has an impactful career.

[hollowturtle]

Never mentioned Mitchell I'm generally speaking, 95% of industry is not Mitchell