With the basic and enormous difference that the feedback loop is 100 or even 1000x faster. Which changes the type of game completely, although other issues will probably arise as we try this new path.
With the basic and enormous difference that the feedback loop is 100 or even 1000x faster. Which changes the type of game completely, although other issues will probably arise as we try this new path.
That embeds an assumption that the outsourced human workers are incapable of thought, and experience/create zero feedback loops of their own.
Frustrated rants about deliverables aside, I don't think that's the case.
No. It just means the harsh reality: what's really soul crushing in outsourced work is having endless meetings to pass down / get back information, having to wait days/weeks/months to get some "deliverable" back on which iterate etc. Yes, outsourced human workers are totally capable of creative thinking that makes sense, but their incentive will always be throughput over quality, since their bosses usually give closed prices (at least in what I lived personally).
If you are outsourcing to an LLM in this case YOU are still in charge of the creative thought. You can just judge the output and tune the prompts or go deep in more technical details and tradeoffs. You are "just" not writing the actual code anymore, because another layer of abstraction has been added.
Also, with an LLM you can tell it to throw away everything and start over whenever you want.
When you do this with an outsourced team, it can happen at most once per sprint, and with significant pushback, because there's a desire for them to get paid for their deliverable even if it's not what you wanted or suffers some other fundamental flaw.
Yep, just these past two weeks. I tried to reuse an implementation I had used for another project, it took me a day to modify it (with Codex), I tried it out and it worked fine with a few hundred documents.
Then I tried to push through 50000 documents, it crashed and burned like I suspected. It took one day to go from my second more complicated but more scalable spec where I didn’t depend on an AWS managed service to working scalable code.
It would have taken me at least a week to do it myself
It doesn't have to be soul crushing.
Just like people more, and have better meetings.
Life is what you make it.
Enjoy yourself while you can.
It's not strictly soul-crushing for me, but I definitely don't like to waste time in non-productive meetings where everyone bullshits everyone else. Do you like that? Do you find it a good use of your time and brain attention capacity?
Just have better meetings
If we could I think we would be doing that...
It's going to come across very naive and dumb, but I believe we can and people just aren't aware of or they simply aren't implementing the basics.
Harvard Business Review and probably hundreds of other online content providers provide some simple rules for meetings yet people don't even do these.
1. Have a purpose / objective for the meeting. I consider meetings to fall into one of three broad categories information distribution, problem solving, decision making. Knowing this will allow the meeting to go a lot smoother or even be moved to something like an email and be done with it.
2. Have an agenda for the meeting. Put the agenda in the meeting invite.
3. If there are any pieces of pre-reading or related material to be reviewed, attach it and call it out in the invite. (But it's very difficult to get people to spend the time preparing for a meeting.)
4. Take notes during the meeting and identify any action items and who will do them (preferably with an initial estimate). Review these action items and people responsible in the last couple of minutes of the meeting.
5. Send out the notes and action items.
Why aren't we doing these things? I don't know, but I think if everyone followed these for meetings of 3+ people, we'd probably see better meetings.
Probably like most businesses issues, it's a people problem. They have to care in the first place and idk if you can make people who don't care starting caring.
I agree the info is out there about how to run effective meetings.
I think there's a certain kind of irony in being asked externally to enjoy the rubbish I've been given to eat. It's still rubbish.
Not really, its just obviously true that the communication cycle with your terminal/LLM is faster than with a human over Slack/email.