Robots talking to robots

A few weeks ago I read a great post by Niklas Gruhn called Stop being a meat proxy like everyone else reading Hacker News. I am the first to admit that I sank a little in my seat in recognition. I could think of numerous times when I copy-pasted Claude responses, not only that, but I had recently begun letting my agents reply to pull request comments and even reviewing PRs assigned to me.

In an effort to be more productive I let the AI respond for me, and I was on a high of “I get so much done with so little effort” but when I let the AI respond for me, I risk letting it also think for me. All in the name of efficiency. But once I outsource the thinking, I stop understanding what is happening. Do I really understand what the conversation is about when I didn’t take the time to read the question or the answer?

I have begun thinking that I should not aim solely for efficiency but also for understanding. Slow down and think too, read what the AI is saying and form my own opinion, not because it is faster but because it is slower.

I recently had a day that ended with me burning out. I had been juggling three agents, one building code for me, and two reviewing other coworkers’ code. The coworkers were also producing code with agents and at the end of the day “I” had reviewed three or four pull requests and produced one myself. All of them were 2k+ LOC and with dozens of comments. We produced like crazy but in the end when I opened one of those pull requests it was just em-dashes everywhere. Not one comment by a human.

In the end I only felt exhausted, as did one of my coworkers, and the joy that I usually feel in my work was gone. I don’t think the code we produced was bad, as long as it is not novel, AI handles it just fine but we lost something in that flurry. We lost the human connection of “I am here, let’s work together”.

By outsourcing it to an agent I can move quicker but the real problem starts showing when other developers also do it. It’s quickly becoming robots talking to each other without humans involved at all.

And it doesn’t feel as good anymore.