alt Hacker Newspeople need to reframe coding agent usage. i see a lot of framing in zero-sum terms where it's either all dev or all agent, and then people start dooming and glooming over the latter. in reality it's like that one post on here a few days ago about it being like an iron man suit. it is a glowing, bright white power that can be incredible when wielded properly. unfortunately, people characterize it as an adversarial power that can and will take over your soul.
how about some true synergy instead of boring zero-sum people? smh. the true poetry here is that zero-sum thinking will become more of a thing of the past so there is some natural comedy with this title
This is some anecdata, but I'll share it nonetheless as I have a pretty wide network of software and security engineer friends from which I've heard the following.
Almost no one I know wants agent usage to be a zero-sum activity. There are a few oddballs who obviously only got into software for the money, so any means to that end is acceptable. That does not stop those with say-so over things like employment (and, if you're in the USA, the associated healthcare), from treating it as a zero-sum activity.
When engineers are being told to maximize token usage, are constantly being brought into meetings where they're expected to reveal their latest and greatest use of LLMs, and not using enough tokens in your role is seen as a negative, then the pressure starts to creep in. Yes, I know this is silly to most people who read this site, and I agree. It's bonkers. But there is certainly something to the idea of "AI psychosis" in upper management that is making agent use zero-sum company-wide.