My friends tell me the job is basically managing AI agents and reading Pull Requests. That sounds like hell, and I’ll try to avoid it for as long as possible.
It really is not that bad when you are in a company with a good culture. Leadership is gonna be AI piled everywhere, but imho that's how you learn where to use (and not to use) the technology.
Most places I know that have strict on-premise/air-gap requirements are just investing in on-premise AI and open source harnesses instead. The only ones that don't are the typical places that are slow to adopt technology in general (usually because they can afford to due to historic moat).
Most places that must do things on-prem also have strict requirements and long deadlines.
LLMs can be nice sometimes, but not necessary. Internal teams with "not invented here" syndrome currently working on that stuff are ultimately wasting money until the dust settles a bit more.
Those long deadlines have nothing to do with implementation. It's the game of telephone and accountability bottlenecks. You still want to retain your most experienced devs and give them plenty of time to work. Writing the code was never the bottleneck. A good dev team has balanced experience of the business and the code, not just the code, and certainly not the kind of code an LLM generates. Most of the decisions by those devs happens outside the codebase.
I can only tell you what we see across our customers, which are exactly the on-premise crowd. We are building a ChatGPT/Cowork competitor focused on on-premise needs[0]. While we cover most things outside of the coding side of things, I know that all of them are also embracing coding agents, typically with your usual open weight coding models hosted on-premise.
Sure, the slow behemoths that you talk about exist as well, but I am seeing many companies that have successfully turned compliance into just another kind of process that isn't slowing down the product development lifecycle. And within those process steps they are also able to leverage AI to speed up e.g. review processes.
I interact with plenty of companies - not a statistically relevant amount, but dozens. I'd put this at about 50% right now. I certainly deal with a not insignificant number of meat proxy CEOs, which is highly annoying for the people worrying about the details. But it's not impossible to work with. I just accept the overhead and hope it gets better.
I disagree. Having to work with the clanker is hell on earth. I'll do it if I have to, because I need to eat, but I hate every second I have to put up with those stupid things.
I too have enjoyed vibing some random shit on the side and not having to beg people to build features I want anymore, but knowingly shipping subpar agentic code at work still kills me a little. (Well there’s no pressure on me to ship, but as a self-respecting guy, I hesitate to say I’ll need 5-10x time to really get to the quality I want when 1x time already gets something working, except for really critical components.)
There has been so many projects that I never have had time to do that I've been able to acxomplish thanks to agents.
Setting up more precise automation for my home assistant, expanding android apps with features tha maintainer didn't want to add but I wanted to have, having agents troubleshoot issues in my homelab servers, writing apps from scratch to meet my needs. Ahh, I love it so much.
Comments
It really is not that bad when you are in a company with a good culture. Leadership is gonna be AI piled everywhere, but imho that's how you learn where to use (and not to use) the technology.
Places that can't have code leave the work site still do not use AI.
Most places I know that have strict on-premise/air-gap requirements are just investing in on-premise AI and open source harnesses instead. The only ones that don't are the typical places that are slow to adopt technology in general (usually because they can afford to due to historic moat).
Most places that must do things on-prem also have strict requirements and long deadlines.
LLMs can be nice sometimes, but not necessary. Internal teams with "not invented here" syndrome currently working on that stuff are ultimately wasting money until the dust settles a bit more.
Those long deadlines have nothing to do with implementation. It's the game of telephone and accountability bottlenecks. You still want to retain your most experienced devs and give them plenty of time to work. Writing the code was never the bottleneck. A good dev team has balanced experience of the business and the code, not just the code, and certainly not the kind of code an LLM generates. Most of the decisions by those devs happens outside the codebase.
I can only tell you what we see across our customers, which are exactly the on-premise crowd. We are building a ChatGPT/Cowork competitor focused on on-premise needs[0]. While we cover most things outside of the coding side of things, I know that all of them are also embracing coding agents, typically with your usual open weight coding models hosted on-premise.
Sure, the slow behemoths that you talk about exist as well, but I am seeing many companies that have successfully turned compliance into just another kind of process that isn't slowing down the product development lifecycle. And within those process steps they are also able to leverage AI to speed up e.g. review processes.
[0]: https://github.com/EratoLab/erato
Looks interesting. Might want to double check your website - the Customization / Assistants / MCP pills in your hero aren't working for me
Some do, DOD is pushing grok
Wonder how that happened...
Someone bought a very expensive golf club membership?!
I have doubts
I interact with plenty of companies - not a statistically relevant amount, but dozens. I'd put this at about 50% right now. I certainly deal with a not insignificant number of meat proxy CEOs, which is highly annoying for the people worrying about the details. But it's not impossible to work with. I just accept the overhead and hope it gets better.
The hell part is the delay. Says the PR is done, but you only see the cliff once you read it.
I disagree. Having to work with the clanker is hell on earth. I'll do it if I have to, because I need to eat, but I hate every second I have to put up with those stupid things.
I appreciate your sentiment, but in my opinion this is the best our career has ever been.
This is the magical sci-fi future I always dreamed about, and it's getting better every quarter.
The amount of stuff I can do now, in terms of time and scope and volume, is unreal.
I too have enjoyed vibing some random shit on the side and not having to beg people to build features I want anymore, but knowingly shipping subpar agentic code at work still kills me a little. (Well there’s no pressure on me to ship, but as a self-respecting guy, I hesitate to say I’ll need 5-10x time to really get to the quality I want when 1x time already gets something working, except for really critical components.)
Hell yeah!
There has been so many projects that I never have had time to do that I've been able to acxomplish thanks to agents. Setting up more precise automation for my home assistant, expanding android apps with features tha maintainer didn't want to add but I wanted to have, having agents troubleshoot issues in my homelab servers, writing apps from scratch to meet my needs. Ahh, I love it so much.