Mid year reflection
Welcome to mid-year yapping and reflection of an anon-dev.
This year has been somewhat weird and lost in the shadows. For context, I have been immersed in agentic engineering and entire orgs now run through claude and agentic engineering. What is the state of the things as they stand right now?
First, there is a huge cognitive fatigue and debt. Before when we were moving fast we had technical debt only, the cognitive debt would only be on the new engineers. Now, I am starting to see early signs of cognitive debt among the old engineers too.
Documentations that we read are mundane and the words from clanker are honestly annoying to read. The sentence structure that these models optimized are so repetitive and void of meaning that reading them feels like puking and vomiting words.
My personal conspiracy theory: The providers are maximizing for slop because slop == more token == more profit. It is at their incentive to create a slop machine to maximize their profit. They aren't getting anywhere compressing and saving time. They will get to places by wasting other's time.
At this point people may call it as skill issue but it's not. You can read the same shit all over the internet. The language is limited, the structure is boring and worst... everything is "load-bearing" hahahahah
Did you see what I did there?? I am amazed in my own abilites...
Anyway... getting back to this mid year review, with claude everyone is writing code even the non-technical ones. While the truly technicals ones will have to review a lot of code. There was a meme I saw recently.
SWE = condom for claude.
I mean, productivity is fine and everyone is figuring things out... but holy smokes what is the point of all this when there are so many moving components and the rocket is being built as it is flying in the space.
Anyhow, summary is: cognitive debt is real, too much to catch up to, too much to learn and too much pressure to deliver.