It almost feels like writing a journal entry detailing some sort of relapse on the road to an addiction I’m trying to break. It felt like something I knew I shouldn’t do, but was too tempting not to indulge in. I felt my brain freed up from thinking about hard problems, and able to just scroll the internet while the agents did the work for me.

After a couple of days, I was rationalising this “relapse” as “aid” during a time of many conflicting deadlines. I can clearly say now, this was probably a false belief, and that it probably took me more time to complete tasks due to the amount of fragmentation my attention was subject to.

You can juggle multiple agents at the same time, but tbf, this isn’t what I became an engineer for. During my first job, I made a promise to myself that I will not go down the Engineering Manager career path, and that I will stick to an IC role, despite potential headwinds pushing me back onto the managerial path.

These past couple of weeks, instead of honing my craft, sharpening my saw, and (re-)building up the mental resilience to be able to spend continuous periods of time in front of frustrating problems, I instead spent my time keeping an army of coding agents on task, refreshing their context with implementation details they’ve compacted away, and responding to the slew of notifications reminding me that “Claude needs your attention”.

This is exactly what a Reverse Centaur is, instead of the Coding agents empowering me, I was empowering them, by using my fuzzy human abilities to compensate for their shortcomings:

Start with what a reverse centaur is. In automation theory, a “centaur” is a person who is assisted by a machine. You’re a human head being carried around on a tireless robot body. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete. And obviously, a reverse centaur is machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine. Like an Amazon delivery driver, who sits in a cabin surrounded by AI cameras, that monitor the driver’s eyes and take points off if the driver looks in a proscribed direction, and monitors the driver’s mouth because singing isn’t allowed on the job, and rats the driver out to the boss if they don’t make quota. The driver is in that van because the van can’t drive itself and can’t get a parcel from the curb to your porch. The driver is a peripheral for a van, and the van drives the driver, at superhuman speed, demanding superhuman endurance. But the driver is human, so the van doesn’t just use the driver. The van uses the driver up. – Cory Doctorow

This isn’t fun, maybe I’m just a scrub that doesn’t know how to challenge himself with coding agents, but I derived a certain amount of feel good brain juice chemicals from getting into the flow state of coding, and the chemical-induced rush of completing hard tasks. Maybe Software Engineering will be a dead career, who knows? I can definitely see the market being oversupplied with grads, and coding agents becoming stronger. Maybe this push will make me look to other career paths. Who knows?

Regardless, we’re back on track now, and will push through with the final 14 days of this challenge.

Article argues that we should value maintainers as guardians, and that maintaining is an unappreciated job, because if maintaining is done right, nothing happens.

A big part of the skill in building software is understanding what’s possible and what isn’t, and having at least a rough idea of how those things can be accomplished.

At some point, I will release my post on why I think, regardless of LLM-assisted coding (but even more because of LLM-assisted coding), taste is one of the most important skills a Software Engineer can hone.

These “reforms” have predictably eroded the capacity of governments to carry out basic functions while increasing their dependence on profit-driven companies and contractors that often cost significantly more than government employees. […] contractors now outnumber federal employees by more than two to one (the size of the federal workforce has remained largely unchanged over the last half century, […])

Romania has its own version of this problem. The consultancy and contracting ecosystem around EU fund absorption in Romania is enormous, and there’s well-documented waste in how procurement operates at the local level.

The Bolojan government decided instead to cut teachers’ salaries and plunge a country that has been in permanent austerity since 1989 into even more austerity.

Again, not fully Bolojan’s fault, as adherence to EU’s strict Excessive Deficit Procedure is not optional (unless for war spending lmao), and Bolo’s top priority was avoiding EU sanctions and a sovereign credit downgrade to junk.

Regardless, I’m not surprised that Euroscepticism is blooming in Eastern Europe, with citizens being told they have to tighten the belt, but the state is allowed to boost defence spending only.