I do most of my coding in Slack now
This is what a developer told my educator friend form yesterday’s post. Yeah, agentic coding does this. From the very beginnings of ChatOps automation to today’s environment, this was something bound to happen.
Immediately I responded to my friend with the healthy mind platter:
Working with Agents from Slack (or other chat applications; I know of people that connect their agents to Telegram for example) while giving the dopamine fix of “achieving stuff” and “increasing productivity”, does not allow for your brain to relax. I’ve seen people discuss their exhaustion from context switching and from actually working more with a technology that promised to make us work less!
In the end, and because it is extremely difficult to set boundaries with notifications on the phone, you never rest. Those extra five minutes that you will talk to the agent to direct it, are gone from your rest and other family activities. And then 20 minutes after again and again. You lose your downtime and you can definitely affect your sleeptime too:
- Downtime: When we are non-focused, without any specific goal, and let our mind wander or simply relax, we help the brain recharge.
- Sleeptime: When we give the brain the rest it needs, we consolidate learning and recover from the experiences of the day.
It also reminded me of Beggars in Spain, where
the Sleepless are superior in mind and body, and easily capable of outperforming their normal cousins. All men are not created equal. Where, then, is the line between equality and excellence?
We have put ourselves in a competion: The combination of an agentic swarm and their human overlord, easily looks like the Sleepless in the novel, whereas anyone without agentic use, less access to agentic infrastructure, or downright excluded looks like a Sleeper, eventually driven out of the workforce. And currently, via tokenmaxxing, other pressure to adopt AI use and lay-offs, we are pressed to form cybernetic entities that act like the Sleepless. And I am certain there exist people hoping for the elimination of the human element, hence terms like dark software factory (code shipped that no human has read and is verified only by other machines), resulting in true Sleepless entities.
The OODA loop of the Sleepless is simply faster than that of the Sleeper. Which is why I believe that most of us working with this toolset, are trying, even unconsiously, to position ourselves such that when we are not needed anymore, we can still have a life.
I need to revisit the book and finish the trilogy.
It is not whether directing agents via Slack is actual coding / engineering / whatever or not. It is what it is. And the endgoal is to ship something you were asked to. That’s the job. The craft is a different thing.
