I don't mean to be harsh, only passionate.
I have a hard time seeing your way. I build software. Tools for humans to do stuff. Whatever they want. Then it gets complex. There are methods to make it more accessible to more people including so called agents. I want to go to there I want to enable the humans.
I feel you bro that you see human getting squeezed out. I do not see it that way. The human is still the nexus.
CEOs and tech bros and hype are all a distraction and a fog that will dissipate with time. We need to focus on the functionality and utility. We are engineers
You are a valuable person in the conversation and we all need you to participate with eyes wide open. I assume you are young. That's not discounting it is welcoming.
[edit: cleaned stuff up to hopefully make it more direct and non-confrontational]
This feels inverted to me: downtime affords us variety. If I have little downtime then I'll strongly prefer known, efficient methods of doing something, rather than experimenting with new ones.
> As the job gets stripped down to its core function, while a machine keeps the pipeline full so that the work can continue uninterrupted, the downtime slips away.
This I agree with, though.
Editing to add my own salient tl;dr: shifting the "easy" tasks onto AI agents leaves the human ones to shoulder the cognitively demanding loads, resulting in burnout.
There are nuances, of course, but if you imagine that while once a human might have been responsible to move 500lbs a day, broken up into primarily small loads, now a robot is moving anything under, say, 20lbs and the human is left to only carry the heavier loads across the same time period so is now hefting 50 or 100lbs at a time and required to do across the same day, so now they're moving 1,500lbs a day.
Ultimately, and this applies to so much of life, "to each, their own," right?
What is lost when losing the (understandably annoying) process of the grind? By letting LLMs do the busy work, do you lose the opportunity to stumble into randomness? Do you lose the understanding of what is possible/interesting with the medium?
And do you end up in this derivative future where decisions are made by a system that was trained on all the previous uses of it?
Obviously that's fairly hyperbolic, but I have absolutely felt the pull of it all. When it decides to take a couple extra steps I didn't ask for creatively and I think "eh, that's fine."
*EDIT: I wrote this and looked back and this SOUNDS like an LLM wrote it. See what I mean??????
Thank. God.
I never want to rotoscope again.
And frankly I'm not fond of editing either.