Being a meat proxy for AI should be grounds for getting people fired

anovikov

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".

dawnerd

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.

benenrjdnz

All work will be like this forever more. Most work is actually pointless bullshit. Get used to, or opt out of it all.

monksy

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".

locallost

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.

theplague42

How often could the question have been answered by that person’s own agent in the first place?…

ginkgotree

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.

hatch_q

> 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?

cedws

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.

s-lambert

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.

ygouzerh

> 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) .

darkwater

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.

atmosx

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.

jongjong

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 is so well laid out, it 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. Great way to make yourself indispensable as an engineer. What the author is suggesting isn't only immoral, in practice, it's not going to work. 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. Managers who promoted people based on how much code they wrote and how many PRs they merged are going to get their punishment soon. Whatever metric you use to coerce engineers into working in a particular way is going to create problems later. You can't coerce people into producing quality engineering. If you ask an experienced farmer to plant a crop but you insist that they must dig holes using their nose because that's your way of doing things, don't expect them to be productive and don't expect them to stick around very long.

dkrich

This is written for devs but the same applies to many areas of knowledge work. In my company one of the negative side effects of widespread AI adoption is that the worst performers or people with the least understanding of what’s being done (and typically generally lazy if we’re being honest) have adopted AI tools to do everything- review and summarize documents they should be reading, drafting emails and design documents, and in many cases writing messages to team members. The company seemingly has no issues with this as it’s almost always blatantly obvious that AI was used for the output. For example, Copilot has a very distinctive and obvious color scheme and format it uses for Word documents and diagrams that are almost always orders of magnitude more complicated than is warranted (which makes all of this coming from people who have zero understanding of what we’re doing even more absurd). Nevertheless they do it every day and send AI-generated summaries of documents out to the team for review without even reading them first. I’ve railed against this for nearly two years to the point it’s nearly driven me mad but so strong is the AI adoption religion that suggesting that it’s poor practice feels like blasphemy and by suggesting real work be done that I’m somehow doing things the wrong way. This has allowed these types of people to remain in their jobs and thrive and so when the AI bubble finally bursts I fear it will reveal largely hollowed out companies where top lower level people have either been pushed out or left.

Nursie

As someone who made a reasonable reputation for himself by being a meat proxy for google search for years (Hey, go ask him, he knows about loads of stuff...) I'm surprised anyone even notices if others are just doing auto-reviews. > I always saw the software engineering field as being comprised of two groups of people: people who are devs because they are passionate about building software, and people who don't actually enjoy software but joined the field because it's a job that pays well. There's a third motivation hiding in there, people who were passionate about coding, rather than building software. It's a subtle difference but an important one. Folks whose primary focus is building and delivery are having a field day with LLMs because they've found a way to build and deliver in far less time with far less resource. Folks who have been more passionate about the coding itself are finding that their legs have been shot out from under them, because what they enjoyed and where they thought their value lay is becoming less relevant. I absolutely get the frustration here, but conversely I think some companies now are seeking to remove the human from the loop as much as possible. That interactive AI-assisted workflow? That's a mid-state, why not instead have a multi-stage automation pipeline, to digest a set of requirements, build granular jira tickets for the work, come up with acceptance criteria, implement test harness additions for those, build the code, test it, iteratively review the code from several different viewpoints (security, minimalism, performance etc), and post it as a PR? Sure, you probably want a plan-review checkpoint, and the agents should stop and ask when they need to know something from their human overseers, but ... we're going more automated in general.

VCFundedGenYer

Agreed. And also this article should NOT be flagged. Decision vetoed. There's a few at my work who only reply with copypasted LLM output and that is completely despicable.