5,000 Lines of Trust
Alt title: Engineering Agency in the Age of Agents
Amidst the humdrum hustle of a warm San Francisco Friday, my little command line agents are writing code, endlessly whirring, pontificating, and moseying. I interject here and there and respond to questions; I am heavily involved in the initial planning phase, but I take a less active role once the team begins the execution of the work. I review the code after I have a second team of agents review the code. I perform the remnants of testing before I push my code.
My code… Is it still my code? At my very core, I am an engineer. I love building castles out of code and data. I used to cherish knowing the ins and outs of a system that my human team and I built. I may not have known every tiny bit of it, but I knew how to debug them and how to look at logs in the absence of metrics to find the needle in the haystack.
Now, here I am with 5000 lines of code in a single PR, every bit production-ready, and I am heavily I wouldn’t describe myself as 100% reliant on the agents, as I still own the design of the system. I also must mention that this line is a bit exaggerated in this musing. We are still a bit away from cooking up something so complex and production ready instantaneously. Cycles of conversations with agents seems to do the trick but the end result isn’t a dramatic improvement. Also, see anthropic’s research on this topic. reliant on an extensively verbose documentation to understand the intricacies of the system. My mind is tense at the amount of information it is suddenly consuming. Perhaps the easy way out is to trust the agents; That trust comes with the acceptance that I will be further reliant on them to debug issues.
This shift forces a confrontation with the nature of volition itself. In the old world, my agency was expressed through the doing. Now, my agency is expressed through will. From “How do I implement this?” to “How do I ensure this system represents what I wanted?”, the stakes have become higher.
I am left with hesitation, though; I do not have all the answers yet. This year feels both magical and calamitous, all at once. It’s like a speeding train that does not seem to have brakes. There is always great joy and purpose in creation, but there used to be a greater joy in the journey of it. And now, that’s gone.
My work identity has evolved in the last 8 months. I can still write code, but I am now more of a designer and an architect than I ever have been. At times, I wonder at the grandiose nature of the systems being built out of thin air. I marvel at them, but very differently from the ones where human teams breathed life into them through hard work for months on end, in iterations. Every such thing suddenly feels pointless in its old form. That’s what confounds the most, I think – a loss of familiarity, forcing a search for a new kind of gravity.
These reflections meander to intrinsic motivations. Creating designs brought joy because it was like assembling a jigsaw puzzle. Fixing bugs was like embarking on a grand quest. At the end of it, there was an answer, an explanation, an understanding. The rhythms of team dynamics, pair programming, and rubber-ducking – it made work interesting. While the human team dynamics haven’t drasticallychanged, the invisible dynamics with AI agents have. So, now what?
I have no qualms about automation or AI I believe we eventually will achieve AGI, and hope that it is achieve safely and sustainably. . The pace of transformation leaves an unease because my internal mechanics need constant reframing. I enjoy building products end-to-end, so it’s no longer about castles, but rather the cities. I am finding myself deeper in the grips of understanding systems, so it’s the workflows, and not the code. In some crude sense, it’s about deciding why the haystack needs to exist at all. My focus is shifting deeply toward understanding the motivations, rather than just the artifact of these agents - the code itself.
I am excited for the things that are now within my grasp, much more than ever before. I can teach myself faster than ever before with the help of a team of assistant agents. I can optimize my life cheaply for monthly agent subscriptions These encompass health, dating tips, career advice, financial planning etc. at the expense of privacy. Everything is at my fingertips. I just need to instruct. I am the conductor, the orchestrator. I am now an urban planner, instead of a stone mason. Everyone is.
I feel like I have zoomed out; that’s why I think in terms of cities, and less in terms of castles. But equally, and in the opposite way, I think about how these castles are being built. What hidden structures lie beneath these walls that tell us more about their creators themselves? Perhaps I am trying to be more than just a man, vying for power, power that I once seemed to have, moulded differently. And perhaps, the answer to that quest lies in the psyche of the system.
I’m intrigued by the inner workings of increasingly complex agents, even if I don’t write all the code. I want to understand how my intent is carried out once it is no longer directly in my control.
In these newfound promotions, I wonder what my signature in the streets is. There is no more the tactile joy of a chisel. Like the intimate act of writing these verses evokes joy, despite the pen now a keyboard and the paper a Google doc, the act of creation remains. The journey ahead is understanding the intent, not just in the code, but in the systems it shapes and the paths it sets in motion.