Spending Too Much Money on a Coding Agent

I find it kind of boggling that employers spend $200/month to make employees lives easier, for no real gain.

That’s right. Productivity does go up, but most of these employees aren’t really contributing directly to revenue. There is no code to dollar pipeline. Finishing work faster means some roadmap items move quicker, but they just move quicker toward true bottlenecks that can’t really be resolved quickly with AI. So the engineers sit around doing nothing for longer periods of time waiting to be unblocked. Deadlines aren’t being estimated tighter, they are still as long as ever.

Enjoy this time while it lasts. Someday employers might realize they need to hire less and just cram more work into individual engineers schedules, because AI should supposedly make work much easier.

Coding an actual solution is what, 5-10% of the overall project time?

I dont talk about some SV megacorps where better code can directly affect slightly revenue or valuation and thus more time is spend coding and debugging, I talk about basically all other businesses that somehow need developers.

Even if I would be 10x faster project managers would barely notice that. And I would lose a lot of creative fun that good coding tends to bring. Also debugging, 0 help there its all on you and your mind and experience.

Llms are so far banned in my banking megacorp and I aint complaining.

There's been pretty widespread layoffs in tech for a few years now.

> Someday employers might realize they need to hire less and just cram more work into individual engineers schedules

We are already past that point. The high water mark for Devs was ironically in late 2020 during Covid, before RTO when we were in high demand.