It's horrifying how many people I see here being threatened into using AI. I guess I'm fortunate in that I have a choice.

I've used it plenty, more recently than ever before, but I'm coming more and more to the conclusion I don't want anything to do with it.

Botsitting is low-skilled. Low-mental reward work will become low-financial reward work before long.

I was initially worried that I had to keep up, learn the new tools or get left behind. But I'm beginning to see it as an entirely different domain of work, and one I'm fine not doing.

I think I'm best off preserving my skills and autonomy, rather than fighting with an agent and fretting about tokens for the foreseeable. I've no desire to be a botsitter.

Worst case scenario, this really is the future, and I become unemployable in tech: I've done other sorts of work in the past, things I'm happy returning to if this is the future.

I've a hunch that's still going to be a while off. I hope so anyway.

I can't believe "prioritise context switching" is now advice being doled out on HN.

Agents allow for delegation, that’s something we aren’t used to as devs. But it’s very useful.

It’s why the execs get so excited about these tools: they understand how to delegate.

I still do deep work, but I actually enjoy a session bouncing between agents. And I can chose how much focus to give each tasks.

Be real, most of that flow state was typing boilerplate

My experience has been that I can't.

I've just started up a new gig where I'm swearing off any agents, I'm even not looking up answers with an LLM. There's nothing so crazy I'm doing SO still doesn't have the answer.

So far, I'm having a great time. I'm progressing quickly, understanding the domain better.

I'm also finishing an older job at the moment, which has been almost 100 percent agent-driven. Real brain-dead drudge work, there's no flow to get into with these things. I'm not sure it's been any quicker than the old-fashioned way. Certainly a lot less fun.

A strange game.

I'm a consultant, and had my first conversation about an AI clean-up job this week. I'm also just starting another gig analysing LLM output, my sell is that the analysis is hand-coded, as they weren't able to do it themselves with LLM support.

On the other hand, I'm just finishing an agent-heavy piece. After getting it set up, it's been some of the most mindless and soul-destroying work I've had the displeasure of in a while. This stuff will be near minimum wage in a few years, totally unskilled babysitting.

AI really hasn't been all that bad for work, by volume at least. I know where I want to focus my efforts though.

As a fellow freelancer where do you see that you could survive this into the future?

I operate in a bit of a niche, in terms of my clients. They're all typically people I've worked for full time in the past, or closely related. There are some fundamentals of that business I worry about, but I'm able to do things they can't, and I'm looking alright for the year. That's as good as I can generally wish for.

Longer term, I don't know. I'd happily take something more secure if it came along, as long as it's not childminding for an agent. Super busy and bored out my mind the last few weeks, the worst sort of work.

I love my Surface laptop. I use arch, BTW.

Surface Pro with Debian KDE here. I just dressed it up like Windows 7, because I need more Fruitiger Aero in my life.

Does the btw version have a changelog published somewhere?

The older I get, the less interested I am in seeing big bands. I'm lucky to live in an area with a great local music scene, plenty of independent venues.

I can't think of a single band I'd pay these extortionate prices for, I'd much rather support a local band and local venue.

I'm saying I don't need to give sleazy American companies money in order to enjoy great music, and that I put money back into my local economy when I go out for a gig.

Regardless of taste, it's mostly up to consumers to keep prices in check, by saying No at some point

Yes

Yeah, flash is crazy fast, but I've found performance variable.

Flash is amazing if you know the domain really well.

E.g. occasionally it makes the dumbest mistakes you've ever seen and can't correct them. However it's fairly rare, and if you know the domain really well, occasionally popping in the code and pushing it towards the correct solution takes like 20seconds or whatever.

So the speed you can move with flash + high domain knowledge beats opus by a mile in my experience.

I tried to switch back to 4.8 for a bit when it came out, feels so bad waiting 20mins for a mediocre solution when I could have had everything complete - with multiple iteration cycles - in flash in like 3-5mins.

Yes, you don't need much domain knowledge to use Opus, but it's just way too expensive.

For losers who can't put together a program to save their life, have no real skills and were always not really interested in programming (hence their poor skills), renting a robot buddy to do it for them is a good deal, until the buddy cuts in materially into their salary, and until their bosses realize that they really just have robot operators on staff instead of people who can actually do things.

It's nice when I want to be lazy though.

Or when I'm working two contract gigs. I can spec things out for one and turn it loose and trust it. Then work more closely with deepseek on the other project.

I stopped travelling the world to build up a library.

The USA is terrifying from a non-US perspective now, and it's never been great. We're furious at the states and sick of being dependent on its enshittified technology.

Anti-AI sentiment absolutely and correctly has a "USA bad" steak.

*streak

You are your own worse enemy. I really hope you never have to live to see you get what you want. I suspect you wouldn't like it very much.