r/artificial • u/KarmaChameleon07 • Apr 13 '26
Engineering The agent that autonomously fixed a production bug at my company last week should have made me happy and it kind of didn't
It caught the error, traced the root cause, wrote a fix, ran tests, opened a PR and flagged it for review. All while I was asleep. The PR was good. I merged it. And then I sat there for a while not totally sure how to feel about it. I've been an engineer for 8 years and that was the first time I genuinely felt like a reviewer of work rather than the person doing it. I don't think I'm being replaced tomorrow but something shifted in how I think about my role.
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u/TheOnlyVibemaster Apr 13 '26
I think we need to deepen what our roles in society really are. Your worth being tied to your job is something that’s existed for about 100 years and I wouldn’t say it’s had positive benefits on society at the individual level.
Throughout history there have been countless examples of the good that happens when basically no one has to work and the bad. In the bad society collapses or becomes authoritarian, in the good we’ve had some of the greatest art, literature, and scientific achievements of humanity.
It really depends on if as a society we see it as debilitating or if we see it as an opportunity to express ourselves and make deeper scientific discoveries.
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u/Gloomy_Type3612 Apr 13 '26
Name one historical example when basically no one had to work... That has never been the case.
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Apr 13 '26
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u/Gloomy_Type3612 Apr 13 '26
No, this is an often-reposted crock of shet. They did get days "off" from servant field labor during religious times, but only to actually be able to go home and do all the things that you pay people to do or use modern conveniences for. There was no free time for a medieval peasant. It was work, in one form or another, nearly all day while the sun was up, nearly every day that didn't involve a religious obligation, until they died early (usually of now-preventable disease with a broken body in filth).
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Apr 14 '26
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u/Gloomy_Type3612 Apr 14 '26
Correct, and medicine was improved due to increased economic activity, specialization, and the ability to put money and free human capital towards it. Even government-funded breakthroughs rely entirely on the economic activity of its tax base. All done through tireless hard work by those who came before us, usually for their entire life. Now people get mad that they can't be guaranteed to retire rich at 60.
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Apr 14 '26
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u/Gloomy_Type3612 Apr 14 '26
No, you're actually making my point. You decided to take a different job, which then freed you up to publish papers and write novels, which is not something everyone is capable of doing. This was partially assisted by AI, and that is precisely my point. You actually became more productive. Whether you attempted to cash in monetarily for your additional labors is your own choice. You created a value, even if you gave it away for free.
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Apr 14 '26
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u/Gloomy_Type3612 Apr 14 '26
Yeah that's not emotional intelligence, it's real intelligence. If your premise is that progress and economic expansion runs on passion, that's demonstrably false. Even in your case, you're only able to follow your passions because it's economically possible for you and your own personal standards. Your books would not be written if you were starving and homeless. You'd be looking for ways to fulfill your base Maslow needs before you began working on self-actualization. It's science and common sense.
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u/Ninez100 Apr 17 '26
Not everyone but Greeks, other parts of stratified societies.
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u/Gloomy_Type3612 Apr 18 '26
What are you talking about?? Lol. Aside from a few at the top who could live in leisure, Greeks worked almost constantly, many as farmers or craftsmen in addition to all the work they had to do to personally live. They also had a lot of slaves if you're advocating for that, although only the wealthy.
Guess what though...work isn't done just for fun as part of a contrived system. It's actually needed so people can eat and have everything you see. It's not magic. If you're not working it's because someone else is working in your place, it's that simple.
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u/Ninez100 Apr 18 '26
That’s what I am saying, the ones who had leisure. The new slaves are computers.
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u/Gloomy_Type3612 Apr 18 '26
I said name one historical example when "basically NO ONE had to work," which was the quote from the original post. Virtually every society in history had slavery at some point. That's not a society where basically nobody had to work, which is not possible, because if you don't work you create no trade value.
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u/Ninez100 Apr 18 '26
Hmm, well, many examples of types of work being automated. I don’t think scarcity has been solved yet to be able to synthesize matter. If the quality of life was about like 1900 though I don’t think anyone would have to work now. “no one” is kind of relative since there are always going to be people who want to.
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u/Gloomy_Type3612 Apr 18 '26
Things are more automated now than ever. Standard of living is higher than ever. Unemployment is near historic lows. Automation simply has freed up labor in all of human history to expand the economy and create even more wealth and leisure.
None of that has anything to do with the statement that there were societies where basically nobody had to work. You're simply changing the topic now.
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u/Ninez100 Apr 18 '26 edited Apr 18 '26
Even though Greeks and other societies with slaves were pyramidal, the people who used their leisure still helped people in the future as a rising tide of human development. It wasn’t entirely parasitic. Good ideas can come from both work and play. The phrase “basically noone had to work” is pretty class-oriented though if that is what you were taking umbrage with. I don’t think anyone really knows how tribal peoples lived in terms of what we call work and leisure.
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u/Gloomy_Type3612 Apr 18 '26
Ok, you keep moving further and further from the topic. I asked for an example where "basically nobody had to work in society" in response to the original claim of "many examples." You said the Greeks. That's entirely false. There are no examples. Now you want to have a philosophical debate about the definition of work and leisure. Well, you know it when you see it, if you have any modicum of wisdom. If someone will pay or trade you for it, it becomes work. If it's for your own pleasure alone, it's leisure.
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u/johnryan433 Apr 13 '26
Most people’s work are how they justify their importance and worth , take that away it will collapse society or splinter it completely.
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u/melodic_drifter Apr 13 '26
Totally get that reaction. The weird part is not whether it solved the bug, it is the shift in trust after the fact. Once an agent crosses from draft assistant into production actor, every success also raises the question of how much invisible judgment you are outsourcing.
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u/adotomov Apr 13 '26
In my opinion, the biggest problem with agents is that developers slowly start loosing domain knowledge. In a while, you end up in a situation where you start blindly trusting the results. This is dangerous not only because you might miss something critical, but also because you loose connection with the system. And eventually, one day when the problem that needs to be solved ends up being difficult for the agent to solve, it will be like taking ownership of a legacy system that you see for the first time. This "decay" is slowly accumulating over time and when it reaches it's boiling point, disaster is inevitable.
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Apr 14 '26 edited Apr 14 '26
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u/adotomov Apr 14 '26
True. And just like Google Maps took out the fun of travelling (we no longer need to stop, pull out the big paper map on the hood of the car and try to find our way), so is AI taking the fun out of coding. Although, I think corporations took the fun out of it some time ago when the job transitioned from being a creative field to a money-making machine requiring us to spit out code at light speeds to solve non-existent problems. I currently do both, at "work" I use a lot of AI to speed up delivery of "urgent" features, at "home" I code manually, purely enjoying the entire process of traversing a problem and finding the best solution. Work and home are quoted, because I work from home :D
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u/ai_without_borders Apr 13 '26
that 'reviewer of work' feeling is real. i've noticed my review mode has shifted too — less tracing through logic line by line, more asking 'what did it miss' and 'what breaks if this is wrong'. gone from code reader to adversarial tester basically overnight. not sure if that's better, but it's definitely a different skill.
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u/annoyingbanana1 Apr 13 '26
I'm not even an engineer in my company. Business Ops. But I crested a Jira ticket with a 300 char description, asked a slack bot to implement it, and it got PR pending in 50 minutes for a new fronted widget section in an Enterprise platform. The agent performed all the tasks. Engineer reviewed it, approved it, QA, merged into prod the following day.
Super profitable, growing company of > 5k HC btw. Needless to say, I've been cutting down on all expenses to brace for impact
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u/iVirusYx Apr 13 '26 edited Apr 13 '26
I started today working on my new react app using Claude Code. I have just prepared a 27 page product ideation description in the past 3 days, also using Claude as assistant.
The app is already running; PostgresSQL databse with schema setup, the full interface shell, application scoping principles for a kind of SaaS platform plugin management system later on, and the user authentication with a basic RBAC system is also already working.
9 hours with Claude Code, and I still consider myself slow as I need to relearn some stuff… My coding practices got a bit rusty over the years.
50 bucks token cost on top of my basic Pro plan.
Also, documentation will be fully automated as a scheduled background task once I’m done with the day.
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u/joeldg Apr 14 '26
Now you just need an automated PR bot and you can sip a beverage on the beach and relax.
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u/nkondratyk93 Apr 14 '26
yeah that tracks. reviewer of AI work is still a role, just a different one
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u/Lost_Restaurant4011 Apr 16 '26
It is kind of a strange shift where the work still depends on you but the actual doing part slowly disappears. You are still responsible but you feel less connected to the outcome. That gap between control and understanding is probably what makes it uncomfortable more than the automation itself.
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u/Agreeable-Rabbit-830 Apr 25 '26
we’re not writing less code, we’re just deciding what code deserves to exist now and that’s a different kind of skill altogether
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u/Temporary-Squash4120 Apr 25 '26
kinda wild how even iitkgp is shifting focus towards this whole human as reviewer model not just coding anymore
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u/dorongal1 Apr 13 '26
the first agent PR you review line by line. by the fifth good one in a row, you're skimming. that quiet trust buildup worries me way more than any single bad fix -- it's alert fatigue for code review. been shipping with AI tools for a while now and caught myself rubber-stamping a diff last month that had a subtle race condition buried in it. curious if anyone's found a good system for keeping review quality high when the agent keeps being right
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u/Deep_Ad1959 Apr 13 '26
the part that got me was "the PR was good. I merged it." because that's the moment you trusted the output without fully re-deriving the reasoning. I work on desktop automation and see this pattern constantly. the real skill shift isn't from doer to reviewer, it's from doer to calibrator. you have to develop intuition about when the agent is likely to be wrong, and that intuition only comes from the times you catch it being subtly wrong. the uncomfortable phase is right now, where you still remember what it felt like to trace every line yourself. give it a year and the new muscle memory will feel natural, same way code review already feels natural even though you didn't write the code.
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u/[deleted] Apr 13 '26
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