“You’re probably in an office banging on a computer somewhere.”
Frank Silva was talking about his work as a ship’s clerk as ports became more automated. He noticed there were fewer people around and less working together. “You’re just sort of [an] isolated little thing.” And what stuck with him was the guys bringing sweet potato pies to work on Tuesdays.
They had a Waterfront Writers and Artists group where they took photos and made recordings to capture a day in the life before it faded out of memory. It got me thinking about my job as a software engineer and the obvious, or not so obvious, implications of AI.
If I were to give an oral history, what would I include?
Maybe the new hire rolling into my periphery asking how our system fit together, and me realizing we’re going to need a whiteboard for this answer. Or morning stand-up, when we’d jam one too many people into a spare room (or hallway), not knowing what to do with my hands, or impatiently swaying when somebody went on too long.
Those things we now do over Zoom, the things we can just ask Claude for, the things that we might remember.
My coworker got this ‘Talk to my agent’ hat from a conference last week:
It hit because recently I’ve been finding myself wanting to talk to a real human, not to my agent, not to your agent, and definitely not to you pasting your agent’s answer. Like this comment on r/LocalLLaMA I saw last week:
“Can someone educate me on this? I know what a transformer is, but that’s it. And yes, an llm can answer this, but I much more appreciate fellow humans responses.”
If I need to ask about how someone else’s system works, I used to just message them, sometimes someone I didn’t know, and maybe next time I see them on the floor I say “hi,” who knows. Now I can just tell Claude “go look at their system and figure out X” and never reach out in the first place.
Or maybe I walked over to their desk, interrupting them, and someone overhears our conversation and jumps in, and then another person gets interested and jumps in, and before you knew it the whole row’s going and you’ve lost the plot. People can’t overhear me talking to my agent, nor you yours, and what used to be a lively office becomes quieter and more lonely.
So no, I don’t really wanna talk to your agent. Sometimes I just wanna work with ya, like these guys did:
