The reality of working in tech: We're not hired to write code (2023)

Guess what: This has all changed with LLMs. The impact of the average developer is proportional to the amount of code they ship in a world of copilots (key word is "ship", not write) and that's why some of the staff engineers I work with have 3 concurrent Cursor projects for the same codebase in flight at the same time. These are some of the best engineers I've ever worked with and they have drank the cool-aid of volume over quality.

I'm keen to this because I maintain our CI systems and have become acutely aware of the overhead of hallucinations breaking our CI tooling in pathological ways that draw me in to diagnose. A year ago I would have to log into our CI Kubernetes cluster to diagnose a busted build that doesn't self-report failure maybe... once a month. These days it's a couple times a week. LLM based dev is both amazing in the legit force multiplier it adds to writing code as well as the way it introduces some of the most incoherent and silly ways it breaks existing conventions.

I guess the headline is correct in that we are not hired to write code anymore, instead we are hired to shepherd code now, and a lot of it. And a lot of this code we shepherd is good enough but some amount of it is bad enough to break existing processes, but that is secondary to the volume and velocity we perceive from LLM code gen.

All bureaucracies evolve towards this state, be they governmental or otherwise. The stuff that can be automated has been. (In past times, it was automated in the sense of having clerks performing basic repetitive tasks by hand). But no complex system can be fully automated without breaking down frequently. The bureaucrats are no longer hired to carry out the basic tasks, but to fix the system when it breaks down. (In the past, they helped the clerks, or signed off on a manual override of a process).

Because the automation is invisible, all that the naive observer sees is the stuff breaking down and being fixed by hand, which looks like utter chaos. And they're always drawn to wonder if the system would work better if the people were replaced by automation. No, because new people will need to be hired to keep the new system working.