Am I the baddie?
I am a software engineer. I work for a company that makes software for road construction. Monday last week we were under a bad crunch and we were told to start using agentic workflows. We had like 50 tickets to close by the following Tuesday. I’ve been experimenting with ai development for years now, but this was different. I had access to Opus/Sonnet 4.6, and GPT5.4—the latest models.
Suddenly, they understood. I could talk about abstract concept’s and analogies, and it got them. I was soon working through tickets the first day in hours, what would have taken me days. But we still had a ton of work and not enough time. I was still bound to a single thread of work at a time. So like any problem, I hacked around it. I started with a worktree, where it basically creates a whole other copy of the project I was working in, and that meant multiple threads.
Still I was limited to my single service, and the system that I work on has like 20 services. Wednesday comes, and I’m still cranking the tickets out, when I realized what I could do was create a repo with sub modules for every service. The agent works best when it can find the context it needs without being overloaded.
Thursday comes, and we’re not going to make it I’ve already put in about 40 hours. they said to lean in, so I did. After setting up my MCP servers for our ticket, documentation system, communication, and calendar systems. I told the agent to pull ALL of the tickets for the big feature we are working on, then go through our documentation and communications to look for mentions of this feature, and to turn that into design requirements, then after a Q&A session, we made a plan to implement all open tickets. my idea was that with the full context, it will be better able to perform
It worked, or at least it seemed to. I was almost embarrassed about it. I was talking to our systems architect about how everything is different, and I mentioned this branch of code. he said, ”You know what? Let’s try it“ we brought it to the team, and they figured let’s give it a shot. I hadn’t actually run the code outside of tests. So our QA team dug into it live. The first one worked. The second. The third, and on and on. We went from not going to be able to finish on time, to mostly done. We found a few small bugs, but such is the way of software, especially things as complex as this.
My side project expanded. I created a CLI, a extension for my IDE to manage the local dev environments that could all run independently, and I made a dashboard that pulls all of my tickets, gives me a button to press that spins up an agent with special instructions. it pulls the details and writes the code, pushing it up for me to review. After that i added another button that fixes any issues that come up in review.
My work flow became
Push button
Code review
Maybe push another button
My boss said I had gone plaid. Hahahaha My dashboard became sophisticated, and my process lean. now I had a way to interact with the whole system. I had it solve big problems. Ones that would take months, solved in a day, two with QA.
I had a system to unify our teams, and to allow business analysts to contribute code.
Today, a week later than when I started the project, I talked to two directors and I blew their socks off. We’re talking about doing something like this for the entire company, and I talked about automating the two buttons. It was a big win. I know I have a big raise coming. It’s likely not enough considering my impact.
I went out with friends, and AI came up. they’re pretty sure it’s going to lead to disaster. My general P(Doom) is about 60%. As I was leaving, I had the thought, Am I profiting off of human suffering? I’m proliferating these systems in more places, and my project will mean we are over-staffed at work. It kind of overwhelmed me.
Am I the baddie?
Did the roads get constructed?
I think it might be more accurate to say you’re an efficient component in Moloch’s machine.
But if you care about how things like gradual disempowerment play out, then I think the “baddie / goodie / pawn-of-Moloch” framing is probably not very useful. It might be worth instead thinking more concretely, about things like
How much are my actions contributing to speeding up human disempowerment? [1]
How could I keep my job (or whatever) while contributing as little as possible to various bad things?
Who are the relevant actors I would need to coordinate with, in order to slow things down? What, concretely, is stopping me from coordinating with them, and how could I fix that?
What other important considerations are there, besides “speeding up adoption of AI / replacement of humans”?
What could I do to offset harms I cause?
accounting for the other actors in the Molochian race
You’re not, in my opinion. The opposite. We should have more people like you.
One of the big problem with AI is slowness of diffusion. It leads to a societal-wide lack of situational awareness. “AI is just talk and hype, no big deal, we can’t even see it in the GDP/employment numbers !”
Yes, it would be better if we could get that societal-wide situational awareness by anticipating what AI is likely to bring, instead of “fuck around and find out” approach. It won’t happen. Therefore, we do need as fast diffusion as possible.
Strong-upvoted for asking the right questions.
Well, if you use AI to write closed source software, you don’t know how much of AI-written code is open source code with the license washed off. So to that extent yeah, you might be the baddie and the only excuse is that a lot of people are doing the same. In my projects there’s zero lines of AI-written code.
Now AI can reverse compile, some open source code is closed source code with the license washed off.
Intellectual property is going to go the way of privacy.
What is bad about this? You only get to that in the last paragraph. I can’t quite tell what you mean. There seem to be two topics. One is doom and the other is job loss. These are totally different issues. If AI use is contributing to doom, that is bad. I doubt it, but let’s leave it aside. The rest of the paragraph seems to be about job loss. This seems like a general argument against technology. Do you really endorse the general argument? If not, what is the difference with AI?
I suspect the complexity of work might expand to consume the slack you have just created.
For example, agile software development allowed developers to better react to last-minute changes in plans. As a response to that, many companies mostly stopped planning—what’s the point of thinking about something in advance, if you can change your mind at any moment you want, even repeatedly. The technique that was created to deal with essential chaos coming from outside the company, is now mostly used to battle incidental chaos created by the company itself.
It even leads to more micromanagement, because where previously the managers made the plans, and then the developers made decisions on how to implement it, now the managers can throw dozens of little jira tickets at them, which means that the very task of “splitting a large piece of work into smaller pieces and prioritizing them” was taken away from the developers.
For example, if I told you that you have to create 20 dialog windows which have 95% of the same content, only some different details, you could create one superclass or template class, and then quickly produce 20 subclasses. But if instead I give you 20 jira tickets, one by one, you need to implement each dialog separately, because you can never justify why this specific ticket requires that you create the common abstraction.
I do not have sufficient skills at AI coding to predict what exactly will go wrong; I just assume that it will, based on my previous experience. Now the system saves you some cognitive power—I expect that in response, the accidental chaos in the companies will increase to the degree when you again will have to spend just as much cognitive power as before, only most of it will be spent on battling the new chaos, not producing the software features. For example, the management will change their opinion on what kind of software you are producing 20 times a day, or something like that. Some kind of horror that we can’t even imagine today, but two years later it will be considered unprofessional to complain about it. (Just like today, saying “can’t you guys simply spend 5 minutes thinking about the thing before you create me a jira ticket?” makes you insufficiently “agile”.)
The transition will happen with or without your help.
But speeding it up locally is going to cost people jobs a little sooner.
I think things would go a little better if people in your position sandbagged a bit. But it won’t make much difference.
Yeah. I think that is where I’m landing. I’ve been going hard for the last two weeks, with not enough sleep. It just hit me once I had time to slow down.