4/29/26
I talked with a friend who also uses these tools at work, and a thing that helped me come to terms with some of the whiplash on “these tools don’t work” was him describing them as a different mode of working.
Mode 1 - Like, thoughtfully reading source code, architecting, etc. Being slow and working at a human speed as one mode.
Mode 2 - And then like not needing to understand the minutiae. Being able to have the tool keep you from needing to get into the weeds.
I’ve used it successfully in that latter mode when presented with particularly banal work tasks that I could not force myself to work on.
I still prefer the first mode, especially for things I care about. I think I’m much more invested in the process of writing software than I am in having software that does a thing.
But yeah, just saying “they don’t work” is really reductive and doesn’t really help anything.
I think they don’t help that much with that first mode of working at all. And that’s part of where people are cross talking?
Idk – these thoughts are still half baked. But like baseline… they literally just letting my coworkers ship pull requests.
Are they faster? Is the code better? Is the result better? Will it all explode in 6mo? Idk – those are my real questions…
But like it very clearly works to output software that runs.