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I think this is less an age thing and more of a combined curiosity and systems understanding and thinking thing.

I've noticed the same effect, but the lines it always seems to fall on are if the person fails one (or heaven forbid both) of these: 1) are you curious about how your tools work and how to get better using them? 2) can you hold the mental map of both what you are solving and how your tools work in your head, and explain how information flows.

There is also a dash of: 3) are you willing to try something, even if it has a bit of a screwup risk, just to see what happens?

by lazide8 hours ago|

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Having done all that (what you’re doing) - it often just ends up wasted effort, with poor quality at the end.

Why not just actually do the thing, instead?

by perching_aix6 hours ago|

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You mean why not work myself instead of the agent? That'd be because for me it's been working great, and so it does make sense. In the scenarios it doesn't, I do indeed just fall back to manual work. A lot of those scenarios are obvious too, so not too many wasted runs to speak of either.

I did give up on cheaper models, they required constant babysitting, and in those cases yes, the benefits indeed evaporated. The expensive models have been genuinely working wonders though, and were still able to justify themselves economically plenty, at least by my own measurements.

I think there's also one underappreciated and indirect way agents help with productivity: they counteract the attention span collapse of the past years. By being addictive themselves, they keep you engaged, and being engaged means being productive. Not even asking an agent to check something out feels too rich, and once you've asked, you're already one foot into the flow.

There's also definitely been some honeymoon effect going on for me, where I dived into more work more readily, just to see if the agent can figure things out on its own.

by lazide5 hours ago|

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Being engaged == doing stuff, not necessarily being actually productive.

Busy does not always equal doing something useful.

Easy to pay a lot to the model vendor though eh?

by perching_aix5 hours ago|

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> Being engaged == doing stuff, not necessarily being actually productive.

Sure. So to clarify, no, I did not just spend it on busy procrastination, and I don't think it promotes that either. Would contradict my story anyhow, this was not some trick I was trying to play on you.

> Easy to pay a lot to the model vendor though eh?

Certainly, as I'm not the one paying. Though it's exactly corporate who really wants to have it both ways (who wouldn't?), and keeps trying to get me to use the crappy useless models because they are cheaper, despite them tanking productivity rather than helping it, so go figure.

There will definitely be a time when the hype dries up, and mgmt will start playing hardball. I'm confident that the value is there, and that I'll be able to demonstrate it to them that it is more than worth it. You can choose to not believe that, up to you. Maybe it really isn't true for your line of work, after all.

by lazide3 hours ago|

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I’m not saying it’s bad. I will note, however, that if it is actually accomplishing something net useful usually requires a long attention span and skepticism, which as you note the tools actively train everyone away from.

by perching_aix3 hours ago|

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I did not claim they train people away from either.

That said, the review burden is rough, that I can agree with. I outright felt compelled to evaluate whether the additional review burden did not outweigh the benefits, but at least for my tasks it did not. So grumpily, I simply live with that pain.

Maybe it helps if I mention that my line of work is DevOps and Operations. I have an ongoing suspicion that this area is better suited than average for agentic work. The codebases are relatively tiny, the languages and technologies used are very well represented in training data, and there's a decent amount of side chore. I can definitely imagine agents being a lot more frustrating to work with on proper, sizeable codebases, and the numbers simply no longer adding up. I don't have much of a first hand account with that.

My closest exposure is some personal toy projects, where getting the actual vision out there ended up requiring an inordinate number of turns (this is with a frontier model). In my estimation it was still worth it, but I definitely had to give it a back of the napkin calc.

As far as my work goes, it is of course not magic, creatively worded AWS docs will still trip it up (as they initially also do me). In those cases, my expertise is still required. But the well trodden is very well trodden, and I could cut out a lot of cruft, including a lot of organizational minutia, which I very much appreciate. I was able to burn through my backlog almost completely, for example.