The Human-in-the-Loop is Tired
If you're feeling like your work is simultaneously more productive and less satisfying, you're not broken. The feedback loop is broken. And I think we need to start treating that as an engineering problem in its own right, not a personal failure.
The people who are finding their footing right now seem to share a few traits: they have strong opinions earned through practice, they can distinguish between principles that still apply and habits that were just bandwidth constraints, and they're willing to evolve their workflow without abandoning their standards.
Understanding is the new bottleneck by Geoffrey Litt
You can learn what the agent is doing to make sure you can be an active participant in the creative process.
I have been in this scenario at work and in personal projects as well, where I don’t understand what is going on.
What I usually do is ask the model to create documentation explaining the changes. Not for everything though.
Geoffrey talks about three methods to understand better -
- Explanations
- Micro-worlds
- Shared spaces
Explanations is a skill that I plan on using going forward.
What do coders do after AI? - Anil Dash
But there are people who have spent decades honing their craft, committing to memory the most obscure vagaries of this computer processor or that web browser or that one gaming console, all in service of creating code that was particularly elegant or especially high-performing, or just really satisfying to write. There's a real art to it. When you get your code to run just so, you feel a quiet pride in yourself, and a sense of relief that there are still things in the world that work as they should. It's a little box that you can type in where things are fair. It's the same reason so many coders like to bake, or knit, or do woodworking — they're all hobbies where precisely doing the right thing is rewarded with a delightful result.
Compared to those who see this just as a job, are not passionate about it, and seem like people who will be replaced by AI.