If coding by hand took 10x longer, why would it have bee unreasonable for people to demand more time to code? Seems like floored logic and you're just exciting to dunk on people?

I'm not going to comment on the likely "Goomba fallacy" at work in your comment, but I just want to note:

> team meetings, agile ceremonies, issue trackers, backlogs, slack, emails, design reviews

Are frequently not:

> [important] collaborative activities

I've always been someone who disliked distractions from my "coding 'flow state' they claimed as their most essential and sacred activity to be protected at all costs" (because, you know, I was getting paid to write code and that's the only way I could actually get it done), but I also loved genuine collaborative activities (as in a small number of people, interacting with each other in a high bandwidth way, to figure something out or get on the same page).

A lot of the activities you explicitly mention are usually literal garbage for actual collaboration.

I think there’s some kernel of validity in this comment, but the unnecessarily aggressive tone loses it. This just comes off as bitter.

Comments like these are why I still come to HN. Absolute kino.

That's a straw man at the root of which sits a conflation of at least two types of meetings:

(A)

Meetings where we discuss whether naming two users in an integration test `u1` and `u2` vs. `user1` and `user2` and whether whoever did the former is so hopeless that they should drop all computer work and go work on a farm, and spend an hour of meaningless and meandering style preferences.

(B)

Higher-level meetings where I can communicate with PMs and customers and CEOs almost on their level f.ex. "Does it make sense for us to have primary/co-borrower roles in our credit products or are all sides equally liable?".

---

With the advent of really good LLMs, meetings of Type A are nearly gone and meetings of Type B have increased meaningfully. I am very happy with that new state of affairs. Are you not?

Textbook example of goomba fallacy.

> I mean, they're not even wrong, but the nakedly hypocritical attitude of people who, until a year ago, were the most antisocial and least collaborative members of any team they were on is still extraordinary.

I don't think there is any hypocrisy. The error in the analysis is assuming both conflicting opinions are held by the same person. They aren't.

Collaborative activities and process being important is NOT mutually exclusive with many meetings being useless, agile ceremonies time wasting uselessness and design review being used as a place to pontificate about crap.

NONE of the activities you mentioned are activities that lead to what article talks about - well designed spec.

Just look at what they write. There is a correlation between the Agentic Multitasker and the type of person who wanted results and didn’t care about the coding in itself. That’s what they themselves keep writing.

They are not the same people.

> It's hilarious ... their most essential and sacred activity ... suddenly, and with no hint of shame ... the nakedly hypocritical attitude ... still extraordinary

Calm down the hyperventilating for two seconds, look around, and you’ll immediately see examples of the same group of people who now biTch aNd mOaN about how agentic coding is killing what they love about programming.

It’s interesting to see people either gloat or get incensed at the nerds who like computers in the context of these developments.

But the flow state wasn't just about typing code. The flow state was about understanding the problem, about loading it into your head so that you could "walk around in it" mentally, so that you could figure out that what really needed to happen was that module X needed to add a getter to value foo, that module Y needed to get foo and make a change based on the value, and that the key to making this all work was to add a way for Y to access X that fit within the existing architecture. That took focus, far more than implementing the pieces did.

Then there's the other kind of engineer, who would rather see the world burn and their friends destitute than spend another second in an agile meeting.

Yes this exactly, it's getting ridiculous at this point.

It's precisely because I get swamped with all the non-coding work that agentic coding works so well. And in multiple ways.

- it lets you get back in the flow faster (unless you were used to writing out your inner thinking monologues and reasoning to get yourself back to speed when you come back from a meeting).

- it lets you move faster and take on more on your own, meaning less people needed in the team, less communication/syncing/non-coding overhead.

If you're objective about it, AI coding is going to be amazing for individual productivity. It's probably going to fuck us (developers) over with the reduced demand, lower bargaining power, etc. But just on technical merits it's a great productivity tool.

The models are still not better than me at coding and handholding is required, but the speedups are undeniable, and we're long past the threshold of usefulness. So far all the contrarian takes are either shallow/reflexive pushback because people don't like the consequences, or people working in niche stuff where LLMs are not that great yet. But that has been shrinking with almost every release - in my experience.

I know everyone here writes cutting edge algorithms that were never encountered in the training data, their code is hyper optimized realtime bare metal logic that's used in life or death scenarios and LLMs are useless to them - but most of the stuff I do day to day is solve problems that have been solved before, in a slightly different context. LLMs are pretty good at that.

They were right back then because these tools didn't exist yet, and they're right today because they do now.

What even is your point? Are you... mad because the truthiness of a statement can change over time?

I think probably both things can be true. That all of those things can be actively harmful when they distract the most productive coders from coding, and become more useful when time at a keyboard isn't really the constraint for producing code any more and coordination becomes a more serious problem.

The archetype of the "jerk engineer" is over, because it turns out coding isn't all that valuable anymore. We now need "engineers" who understand much more than coding.

THIS COMMENT IS GOLD.

Another example I can point to is software security. For context, I’ve built and sold two edtech companies that taught enterprise developers about software security .. It didn’t matter how good the training content was .. ouur product replaced boring appsec video training with interactive labs, vulnerable code snippets to hack and fix .. gamification ... leaderboards .. whatever it took so they couldn’t complain about having to watch boring videos .. however the completion rates sucked .. because they just didn’t care regardless of how hard we tried ..

Now post AI .. my Linkedn is full of blogs and think pieces about how important “software threat modelling” and “cybersecurity” are, and how “coding was never the hard part.” ... suddenly, TM, something only a tiny fraction of companies actually practice, is being framed as the real challenge .. and having deep understanding of OWASP / secure design , vulnerable dependencies ..secure architecture ,, is the real bottle neck .. lol

What? Coding was escape from what that hypothetical engineer of yours disliked the most. Now there is less of it and ai hypers keep yapping about the job being no longer needed. Meanwhile it's just the fun part that was optimised out. Working hours stay the same, so it's more of the unfun activities. The job is worse, but we're told it's "solved". Bitching more makes sense, no?

I would say in general the amount of persons who pivot like that is low.

Similarly, the amount of open source people who previously maintained a hardliner programming meritocracy stance and now pivoted to AI and market AI is exclusively limited to those whose companies are working on AI products. The good ones in that space are decidedly less than 1% of all good ones.

I hate meetings when they're mismanaged, which is often. I like a good meeting. Probably what most swes would say.

Welcome in humanity my friend.

Also, expect harsh and rude reactions when pointing to big issues that are crystal clear in the middle of the village. Not all truths are warmly welcomed, especially when looking elsewhere feels more comfortable in the immediate experience.

Take care and don’t worry too much: the journey’s short, so remember to also enjoy the good parts.

Nah they're reaching for something they're good at. Same with you bro.

The stark reality is this. Both coding and project management can be done with AI. I think coding is more important than all the fluff surrounding project management but with AI both are now ready to become obsolete.

The thing with project management is that it's a bit harder for AI to tackle because it's not just pure tokens it needs to deal with. We need to give the agent more tools to interact with real time and real world events for AI to fully take over this aspect of the job, but make no mistake... project management is easier in terms of skill (not in terms of effort).

no, these meetings are still hot garbage.

half the time you’re going to discover the right decision / path while you’re coding.

focus time went from hammering code to figuring out how to solve the problem. PRs are now how we exchange ideas. meetings are still productivity theater.

Looks like this comment is touching a nerve. This community is progressing from "AI can't write code", to "Well, AI can write code but it's not really about the code". I wonder where the goalposts will be moved next?