The Politics of Competence
A colleague recently told me that they find it hard to learn about the state of agentic engineering through talking with friends in the industry, because many are reluctant to open such a converstaion for fear of being seen as an AI enthusiast or more extremely, a self-styled techno-futurist edgelord.
It's a reasonable concern.
Personally, I'm pretty convinced that Generative AI as it exists at this moment is destructive to our ecology, harmful to our social fabric, and totally unnecessary for us as people to thrive. Of course I also think the same is true about cars. And for many folks, it is essential they know how to drive and have a basic understanding of how cars work.
My sense is that this is the state of software engineering right now, and will be for a while into the future. I think these tools are landing in our industry with some weight, and the time is coming when we will need to be skilled with them in order to do what we do. Acknowledging that doesn't require losing sight of the real costs of this technology. If anything, an assessment of those costs has more credibility when it comes from someone who demonstrably understands the tools and how to use them.