I haven't looked at the author's age, etc. But calling for someone to be fired is "not okay". I understand that we live in a polarized world and I understand the frustration but it's still "not ok" for this titles to float around. They feed the beast and that's that.
ps. The assumption is that there was empathy at play to begin with, which realistically speaking many people don't have. They would be calling for co-workers to be fired on several grounds: merit (or "merit"), skill, color-skin, dna, etc.
It’s wild to me how many software engs never want to see code again. IMO they should just retire so someone else that does want to look at code can take the job. The laziness is unreal, all while the same people acting like they’re productive.
I got into this field because it's the highest paid job I have aptitude for, not because I was ever particularly excited to write jobslop code that consists mostly of basic CRUD and business logic.
I don't act as a meat proxy since I have some respect for myself and my coworkers. However, whatever interest in programming I ever had, was completely gone after a couple of years on the job.
That being said, I am, in fact, speedrunning early retirement.
Maybe it's just the sign of an aging profession. A combination of biological aging and an accumulated cynicism sets in, and the expert will declare their field dead and organize its funeral. For a physicist that might hold unwarranted skepticism for newer theories, and a software engineer might attempt to kill their field all-together with AI, visual coding and what not, pulling up the ladder behind them.
In my experience, this kind of developer was always the one taking shortcuts, generating bad code and tech debt and in general just thinking about the ticket they were working on and nothing else.
> Wasting your time... Forcing you to do their work for them
The one forced to do their work for them, are the teammates. Not the manager. The manager only care of it to be done. How it is done: doesn't matter.
I would argue that one of the main reason for meat proxy, is security boundaries.
In the majority of companies with a certain scale, no one can run an AI agent that will do the project from A to Z. You always need to raise at one point ticket to someone else, a human, it cannot even be done by an automated system (technically it could of course, but acceptable by governance... unfortunately no) .
This post completely misses the point and experience that you get as a person who works for a company. There is always an over exaggerated expectation of delivery. You're ranked on how much you can deliver and it completely ignores what is humanly and reasonably possible.
LLMs and agents allow for you to deliver at the rate. But you also have risk associated with that. If you don't like the output, fix your culture before you start blaming people for being "meat proxies".
Meh. Management encourages it. Just do what management wants and collect your paycheck. In this age the nail that sticks out gets hammered down, don't burn yourself out trying to rise above it. And if you think it's bad now, it's only going to be worse in a decade when the next generation come along who have only ever done work with AI.
I check the results and test the agent's changes but for the most part my job now is being a meat proxy. All of the things I get to work on were completely trivial for me to implement so they're even more trivial for the current agents. I don't really see how I can add value to it, like some things are just "hook up this button to call an API", even the models a year ago couldn't fuck this up. At this point the only thing I'm really writing is PR descriptions.
I wouldn't mind being fired at this point though, my job feels like a joke.
Then sending an agent’s result can send a message. And being blessed with great a great team I may get feedback on what caused this to be skipped or fail. We don’t spam each other me forwarding is either endorsing it or asking a question on validity of findings for a reason.
Imho, 90% of "tech" jobs were mindless bs. AI is just exposing it at greater efficiency. The future will be, sadly, mass layoffs and greater corporate profitability. It will drive demand for kind, very smart systems level thinkers that can understand how to mass scale LLMs to build as though they are teams of 100 engineers. I don't know where this ends, but I think we will be living in a very different world in a few years.
But in any case, we are all heading there? Eventually, a SWE will be "a nice smart person that's more pleasurable for the manager to speak to than LLM itself".
Morally speaking, the AI was trained on our code. It's our right to be meat proxies, so long as we deliver.
Also, practically speaking, if the codebase is well designed and has good foundations, being a meat proxy might actually work. If someone puts careful, meticulous thought into getting the foundations of the project right and then turns into a meat proxy because the thing practically builds itself, should they be fired?
If this is the case, then developers have the incentive to create a rotten overengineered foundation, then the AI won't be able to get anything done without human guidance.
What the author is suggesting isn't only immoral, in practice, it's retarded. It's why we're in the mess we are in now with projects with millions of lines of code with new critical vulnerabilities popping up daily. Show me the incentive, I show you the outcome.
I do this sometimes, but with things that are anyway useless crap nobody cares about. Or even worse where the task is small, but someone used Claude to write a huge ticket. I literally cannot bother reading that slop.
I haven't looked at the author's age, etc. But calling for someone to be fired is "not okay". I understand that we live in a polarized world and I understand the frustration but it's still "not ok" for this titles to float around. They feed the beast and that's that.
ps. The assumption is that there was empathy at play to begin with, which realistically speaking many people don't have. They would be calling for co-workers to be fired on several grounds: merit (or "merit"), skill, color-skin, dna, etc.
It’s wild to me how many software engs never want to see code again. IMO they should just retire so someone else that does want to look at code can take the job. The laziness is unreal, all while the same people acting like they’re productive.
Nature is lazy. And as long as they take responsibility for their merge requests (and understand them) ..
Cannot agree more.
I got into this field because it's the highest paid job I have aptitude for, not because I was ever particularly excited to write jobslop code that consists mostly of basic CRUD and business logic.
I don't act as a meat proxy since I have some respect for myself and my coworkers. However, whatever interest in programming I ever had, was completely gone after a couple of years on the job.
That being said, I am, in fact, speedrunning early retirement.
Maybe it's just the sign of an aging profession. A combination of biological aging and an accumulated cynicism sets in, and the expert will declare their field dead and organize its funeral. For a physicist that might hold unwarranted skepticism for newer theories, and a software engineer might attempt to kill their field all-together with AI, visual coding and what not, pulling up the ladder behind them.
In my experience, this kind of developer was always the one taking shortcuts, generating bad code and tech debt and in general just thinking about the ticket they were working on and nothing else.
> Wasting your time... Forcing you to do their work for them
The one forced to do their work for them, are the teammates. Not the manager. The manager only care of it to be done. How it is done: doesn't matter.
I would argue that one of the main reason for meat proxy, is security boundaries.
In the majority of companies with a certain scale, no one can run an AI agent that will do the project from A to Z. You always need to raise at one point ticket to someone else, a human, it cannot even be done by an automated system (technically it could of course, but acceptable by governance... unfortunately no) .
This post completely misses the point and experience that you get as a person who works for a company. There is always an over exaggerated expectation of delivery. You're ranked on how much you can deliver and it completely ignores what is humanly and reasonably possible.
LLMs and agents allow for you to deliver at the rate. But you also have risk associated with that. If you don't like the output, fix your culture before you start blaming people for being "meat proxies".
Meh. Management encourages it. Just do what management wants and collect your paycheck. In this age the nail that sticks out gets hammered down, don't burn yourself out trying to rise above it. And if you think it's bad now, it's only going to be worse in a decade when the next generation come along who have only ever done work with AI.
I check the results and test the agent's changes but for the most part my job now is being a meat proxy. All of the things I get to work on were completely trivial for me to implement so they're even more trivial for the current agents. I don't really see how I can add value to it, like some things are just "hook up this button to call an API", even the models a year ago couldn't fuck this up. At this point the only thing I'm really writing is PR descriptions.
I wouldn't mind being fired at this point though, my job feels like a joke.
> literally all they do is prompt the agent "do X" and copy-paste the results back to you
But there are results. Why didn't you do that yourself first then? Why are you wasting meat proxy's time?
How often could the question have been answered by that person’s own agent in the first place?…
Then sending an agent’s result can send a message. And being blessed with great a great team I may get feedback on what caused this to be skipped or fail. We don’t spam each other me forwarding is either endorsing it or asking a question on validity of findings for a reason.
Imho, 90% of "tech" jobs were mindless bs. AI is just exposing it at greater efficiency. The future will be, sadly, mass layoffs and greater corporate profitability. It will drive demand for kind, very smart systems level thinkers that can understand how to mass scale LLMs to build as though they are teams of 100 engineers. I don't know where this ends, but I think we will be living in a very different world in a few years.
But in any case, we are all heading there? Eventually, a SWE will be "a nice smart person that's more pleasurable for the manager to speak to than LLM itself".
Finally being a nice, pleasant person is paying off.
Humans will always need other humans they can blame. Sending messages to a chatbot in capital letters doesn't give the same dopamine hit.
Morally speaking, the AI was trained on our code. It's our right to be meat proxies, so long as we deliver.
Also, practically speaking, if the codebase is well designed and has good foundations, being a meat proxy might actually work. If someone puts careful, meticulous thought into getting the foundations of the project right and then turns into a meat proxy because the thing practically builds itself, should they be fired?
If this is the case, then developers have the incentive to create a rotten overengineered foundation, then the AI won't be able to get anything done without human guidance.
What the author is suggesting isn't only immoral, in practice, it's retarded. It's why we're in the mess we are in now with projects with millions of lines of code with new critical vulnerabilities popping up daily. Show me the incentive, I show you the outcome.
All work will be like this forever more. Most work is actually pointless bullshit.
Get used to, or opt out of it all.
I do this sometimes, but with things that are anyway useless crap nobody cares about. Or even worse where the task is small, but someone used Claude to write a huge ticket. I literally cannot bother reading that slop.