I was rethinking whether I want to stay in tech today.
The thing is, the way we used to work even just a few months ago has drastically changed.
Agents can increasingly run overnight and keep working. Maybe it’s just a me problem, but the more my agents and I produce, the less able I am to keep up with it. If it were enough to merely read what the agents produced, it could’ve been manageable. But the job is to understand it.
Humans are also lazy. When an agent produces something that appears to work, accepting it is much easier than doing the slower (and mentally taxing) work of understanding it. And the better agents become, the more tempting that shortcut gets.
Without understanding, cognitive and technical debt pile up and slowly erode what you’re building. That erosion used to be slow and manageable, but now agents put a sharp multiplier on it and it gets out of hand pretty fast.
Understanding is only part of what’s missing. The current way of working leaves too little room for creativity and iteration.
Code used to be a medium for thought. It was (strangely so) something tangible that the human mind could deeply grasp, reason about, and collaborate upon with others.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting we go back to reading every line of code. Not at all. But if code is no longer the medium, there has to be something else.
I don’t know what exactly the answer is yet. There might be many, rather than a one-size-fits-all.
We’re in a transition period. On a good day it’s exciting. But mostly, it just sucks.