Thariq says coders feel useless as non-coders envy them
An assertion about mood on both sides of the agent divide, with no measurement behind it.
Thariq posted that technical people are sad and think their skills are now useless, while non-technical people are desperately wishing they were more technical so they could use agents better. He called it a very weird thing happening right now.
technical people are sad, they think their skills are now useless
He then extended the same shape to creative work. Artists are worrying about AI, he wrote, but he wishes he could sketch animation ideas and character concepts for his agent to flesh out instead of hunting for examples. His problem is not that the agent cannot draw. It is that he cannot specify. "I don't have the language," he wrote.
Pressed by Hiten Shah, who said there is a sweet spot and that he sits in it after 20-plus years working with engineers to ship product without writing code himself, Thariq did not back off. He replied that all technical people should be massively amplified, that there are so many ambitious problems to solve, and that the hard part is the shift in mindset.
What this actually is
An assertion about how two groups feel, not a measurement. Nobody surveyed anybody. Thariq is describing a vibe he sees on his timeline, and the counterexample in his own replies is one person claiming to already live in the middle of the distribution.
Still, the mechanism he points at is the specific one worth arguing about. The scarce thing in his animation example is not the ability to execute, it is the vocabulary to describe the thing you want in terms the system can act on. That is a reasonable description of what a lot of agent work has turned into, where the bottleneck moves from typing the code to saying precisely enough what the code should do. It also happens to be the skill technical people spent years acquiring, which is why Thariq thinks the despair is pointed the wrong way.
For working engineers, the practical read is that this is the old question of who captures the gains, restated as a mood. It does not settle anything. If your experience is that the agent amplifies you, the post describes you. If your experience is that it has flattened the value of what you know, the post tells you other people envy you anyway, which is not the same as being wrong. The argument lands differently depending on whether you have already found the vocabulary, and nobody in the thread produced evidence either way.
I wish so badly that I could sketch animation ideas and character concepts for my agent to flesh out instead of trying to find examples
I think all technical people should be massively amplified, there are so many ambitious problems to solve.
Have the good opinion, not the loud one
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