Is that khan from khan academy;
Ah yes, automation, the field that is well known for systemizing processes into chains of predictable machine I/O — the perfect place to inject the mercurial hallucination service I rent.
"Sorry, the job description said we were looking for a software developer, not a bot wrangler. There must have been some kind of miscommunication. Best of luck out there!"
As others have listed, can't really share this as the company owns all the work. Even then, not every company is the same. There's a lot of stupid shit I could automate in my current position that would be useless at every other company--the processes (and reasons behind them) are completely different.
Even if the LLM worked flawlessly, you're just proving your lack of purpose to the company which means they'll fire you. What do these people even think?!
I'm glad I had only spent a few grand on IT certs before the whole industry went tits up. Looking forward to a post internet world with all my hoarded data.
For reference, which certs did you to for?
I was almost done with my CCNA prep when I decided it wasn't worth it to continue
These fucking morons have convinced themselves that their glorious chat bots are actually able to replace actual work.
They can replace some work, especially debugging. There are a bunch of bug fixes I wouldn't have made because debugging them was too inane for too little reward. But Claude has no problem writing 14 throw-away scripts to try and reproduce the issue until it succeeds.
Translation: "I have no real understanding of anything beyond feeding it into ChatGPT. Please pay me millions of dollars to be a net loss to your organization."
Those agents aren't yours in multiple ways. That's not how things work.
It's funny too because as soon as the model changes the behavior shifts. So it's even less of a flex.
I hope the hiring manager responds with leetcode questions on a whiteboard.
An average 22 year old does not have the experience to automate 10 workflows, let alone 100. They also don't know all the gotchas. This is dumb advice.
Also "automating a workflow" IMO shouldn't involve having an agent at the end. If tokens and cloud models with selling a dollar for a quarter pricing levels are required for your automated workflow to work, you've set up a ticking time bomb.
Use this subsidized garage to churn out regular automation that you can maintain after the merry go round inevitably stops. I was told as much by Microsoft AI specialists themselves. Do not toss out working ci/cd processes in favor of putting a chatbot in the middle, because who knows if you'll still be able to run that chatbot in a couple of years.
Years? Many models are gone in a few months. If you build 100 automations based on them, you need to upgrade and retest them constantly.
And most business processes are totally fine with a "If this, then that" logic. Companies work like that. The law kind of works like that. No need for expensive and problematic chatbots. Just automate based on simple if loops.
If people were looking at this intelligently, they'd clearly see that AI is heavily subsidized and you can use the subsidized help to fix your broken shit without becoming completely dependent upon it being subsidized forever.
But stupid is as stupid does, so they'll all just continue to add unhelpful chatbots to their software and token consuming nonsense workflows instead of fixing any quantity of their huge amount of open problems.
Yeah - those people investing trillions in AI companies and datacenters want to earn their trillions back with interest.
Pretty much the same time bomb around any proprietary software.
If someone said "do you want to interview my agents first", I think the interview would be over. Well maybe the first time I'd be tempted to see if I could tokenmaxx someone else's agent. After that it would be too much work for the enjiyment. Maybe I should automate that workflow.... Oh no they got me!
"Your agents!?! You mean the proprietary models you did not develop, own, or control, and just pay a foreign SaaS company to utilize, built by people much smarter than you, using software coded by people much more competent than you, and can be replaced or removed at any time? Why do I need you again?"
"I like money. Me want money. Give money now. Ooga booga"
The caricature you sketch definitely does exist
But so does the IT hobbyist using an open source model with local hardware and customised training.
Of course i just realise that person wouldn’t call it an agent, they wouldn’t tell you to interview the agent and probably wisely frame it as:
“I develop my own tools and automation systems to free up time and resources for more important projects” at most refer to “machine learning” and absolute avoid using the term “ai”.
If you're smart, you'd use your personal computer running a local AI model. It's your expertise that made working prompts because AI on its own is trash. So when you leave, your knowledge goes with you.
Yeah but you're forgetting one thing that years in IT have taught me. Most people aren't smart. Most people are dumber than shit, are barely literate, and refuse to learn. They only know "I press this specific button located at this one place for things to happen". If the button is changed in any way such as a slightly different color or moved by an inch, they are completely lost and helpless
If you're automating workflows, you don't get to take your current employers code with you when you leave.
Are you supposed to just be writing random automations for things that might exist somewhere? Why would anyone think that's impressive?
Either you're showing me something useless you did for no reason, or you're asking if I want to see some stolen IP. Neither of these is giving me a particularly good impression.
Much more impressive to have genuine, real contributions to open aource projects.. Not those garbage "I fixed 10000 typos in readmes which were actually just word choices and 250 of them got pushed so pls hire me"
Even though programming and IT is a great hobby of mine, I ultimately decided not to pursue it on a university level as I didn't want to potentially turn my hobby into something I despise. I've been regretting this decision a lot throughout my life, but as AI becomes more and more incorporated into the work life of a programmer, I'm starting to feel relief. I would not want to work in that field today.
Programmer here: i actively despise where this field is heading and where it is at right now
i’m studying software engineering rn and honestly i’m not sure i even want to finish my bachelor’s degree. finding an internship (required for the degree) is almost impossible now and even if i do manage to get a job, do i want to spend the rest of my life prompting claude? fuck no!
I am a software dev trained 3 years worked 4. Even i cant find a job. Make of that what you will
I was considering it like 10 years ago when you couldn't go anywhere on the internet without someone telling you "Programmers make a bajillion dollars pr day, even the bad ones! You should become a programmer!!!", but I figured it was just companies wanting more applicants to force down the pay.
It's been bad even before that.
But I'm just an old person yelling at clouds.
As someone who made the opposite decision, I get it. And you're not wrong. I still love what I do when it's just me and some trusted colleagues, but I've had to watch people I trusted deeply in this field fall into just the worst AI holes. Thankfully AI is bad enough that, idk how to put it. I've developed an understanding with management and clients that I might not have an email out saying my project is done as fast as the people that do use AI, but my project will actually be done faster. If a solution takes me 2 months to finish, it'll take a week in testing before hitting production. I've seen people declare a solution made in weeks only to spend actual months in testing, having to fix bug after bug. And they're not even the worst offenders. I know people that will deadass say "looks good enough" and have broken test servers with just actual garbage.
I think you made the right choice. The IT sector has been undergoing progressive enshittification for decades and it's really gotten bad with AI.
Regret is a funny thing since none of us are fortune tellers. When you realize that every decision you make works the same way, you get a lot more chill about life.
Laaaaame
First off, they're not his agents unless he's got his own LLM running on his own server; and you can't just show up at a new job with a server all like, yeah, plug this into your network and grant me permissions, it'll be fine.
Secondly, you can automate workflows without LLMs. Crontab, for instance. Trillions of people have been automating workflows for tens of thousands of years. Agentic automation is more expensive and less reliable than cron.
If someone is showing up at my office and telling me they're going to use Claude to rename a .PDF I'm going to laugh and then ask them to leave.
You want the future? Don't be the guy selling shovels during a gold rush. Be the shovel-maker, and then hoard your shovels to inflate demand. Fill your house with shovels. Use shovels instead of plates and cutlery and clothing. Make sure everyone knows that you're The Shovel King (or Queen) and don't tell anyone you're unemployed, no matter how many job interviews you fuck up by talking about shovels.
unless he’s got his own LLM running on his own server
You forgot the part where the LLM also needs to be trained exclusively on the creations of that very person themselves. Everything else is stolen credits.
Why would you go through the hassle of setting Cron when you can ask an LLM running on a server in another continent every minute: "now it's [time]. If it's [time_required], then do this"
Yeah, what the fuck am I automating in my daily life that would be beneficial for a new position I’m walking in to?
Also, automation and AI are not exclusive to each other. I have tons of automations at home and my house is set up with a bunch of virtual assistant commands and lights, Air conditioning and some other things have an automated schedule. None of this was done with AI.
I work as a lead software engineer a at a large e-commerce and manufacturing company. I guess I could train an agentic ai to automate some of my workflows, but at the reduced cost of ownership of problems and intricate knowledge of how to fix issues as they arrive. LLMs love to inject mock data that “looks” right, but in practice this doesn’t mix well with programming.
LLM are self poisoning prediction machine, and as far as I’ve been able to test can’t even handle multi-level react apps that are intertwined with 3rd party applications. Basically making it useless with any software that has multiple integrations.
Aww, poor little guy can’t automate things without agents.
Right? Automation is a fantastic skillset, and when a tool breaks? It takes me a fraction of the time to troubleshoot one I wrote myself than it would some vibe coded bullshit.
And the next tool I write comes out faster and accounts for the edge cases that broke the last one as I understand the system I'm interfacing with better.
Every day I am radicalized a little bit more
This is Sal Khan from the Khan Academy. No matter one's stance on AI, Sal's perspective is worth listening to.
Source: Khan Academy CEO: The Real AI Opportunity Is in Boring Industries.
Why would they hire you if you're not doing anything.
Agents for what? Liking the best memes on Reddit? Discovery for user and business needs is so fucked.
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