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Writing the code is the fun part. Micromanaging interns who can't learn or grow is horrible. I genuinely can't understand why anyone would make that trade.

I guess a lot of the boosters would say that solving problems was the fun part, and you're just solving problems at a higher level. Like writing C# instead of ASM, now you're writing prompts instead of C#

But it does feel like a lot of the time you've really traded "writing software" with "micromanaging somebody else while they write software"

I may not find literally writing code as fun as others do, hard to say, but what was genuinely fun for me and lost was helping other people grow. While I still had human teammates, this was falling off a cliff as everyone unblocked themselves with AI instead of reaching for help from other humans.

Curious: How do you start a feature? Do you just describe the feature and tell it to go? Do you have it interview you? Do you write down a spec or plan? Something else?

We usually have a long discussion, plan mode, then execute. But the discussion can feel like micromanagement too because Infind I have to spell a lot more out to it to get a good plan than I would get from an experienced colleague.

How do the topics in discussion get raised? Do you decide or does the agent decide? If the agent decides, how did you prompt it to choose?

And an inexperienced colleague is becoming an experienced colleague when they did the same with me. With the agent, I have to keep diagnosing why the lessons we wrote down aren’t helping them do better the next time. It’s like debugging markdown and that’s harder than debugging code!

There is still a very real productivity gain but it’s also extremely easy to overestimate it.

The productivity gain would be larger if you had lower standards and fewer opinions going in. Alas, I am who I am.

I’m now at the point where I will attempt Fable for everything which will blow through my $100 Max plan but if it improves or eliminates the micromanaging I need with Opus, may well be worth $200.