'Cause How You Get There is the Worthier Part

The Shepherd

Kaylee: "How come you don't care where you're going?"
Shepherd: "'Cause how you get there is the worthier part."
Kaylee: "Are you a missionary?"
Shepherd: "I guess"
Shepherd: "I'm a shepher from the Southdown Abbey. Book. I'm called Book."
Shepherd: "Been out of the world for a spell. Like to walk it awhile. Maybe bring the Word to them as need it told."

Not an aught-three

...Didn't have the extenders.

Ok though. That's snippet of a conversation from the pilot of one of the, in my opinion, best shows to grace a screen, Firefly. And the line "'Cause how you get there is the worthier part." is up there with other big time quotes from other nerddoms like Gandalfs "All we have to decide is what to do with the time given us.". The Bene Gesserit's Litany against Fear "Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me... Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain." Picard's, "It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." Dr. Ian Malcom's "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." And obviously, "I am your father."

But really, besides the last one, there are so many poignant moments in science fiction/fantasy/science fantasy and to list and explain my favorites is not what I'm trying to do here.

Quite like most people in most professions, I have been thinking about LLMs a lot lately. I'm not going to sit here and say that we're experiencing it in a special way, because maybe we are, but maybe we're not. I think it's the latter. What is interesting from our perspective, though, is that the world is seeing, to some degree the ebs and flows that have been plaguing the tech space since before jquery was a thing. Every new technology is the ultimate game changer. We've finally arrived. Our jobs are going to be farmed out to automation and cheaper labor now that what we do is so "dumbed down" by this new technology. We've been hearing it for a long time. But now, it largely can be done by "automation".

The fork in the road I'd like to look at is not the fork in the road I've heard discussed much in this format, but maybe I'm just not looking in the right places. Output vs the journey to the output.

Sure it's fun to tweak your prompting and engineer your agentic workflow to get better and better results. Sure it's impressive to see what an insanely large statistical model can output when given proper context, 47 agentic plugins, a terminal multiplexer designed for agentic workflows (yes, I'm writing this over a connection to my code server via Herdr). But it also feels empty after the initial cool-factor wears off. It's giving Obama Awards Obama a Medal.

My concern is a loss of system knowledge. A loss of lessons learned. The loss of the journey.

It is, once again, the juxtaposition of the value of the output vs the value of what is learned along the way. (I doubt Sam and Frodo would have the deep connection they do at the end of the books if they just got to ride the eagles into Mordo.) We, especially in software, tend to view the value at the end stage. A shipped product, a new feature that potential customers are holding out for. These are the value drivers. If we could just get to the product faster, our value is better! (Proton CEO anyone?) But this discounts individual experience and organizational knowledge. Maybe one day these will be obsolete, too, but I've seen the systems AI tries to design. And the old adage "garbe in, garbge out" comes to mind. All expereienced software engineers have copy and pasted code from Stack Overflow multiple times. And 99% of the time it doesn't actually do what you want. And then it is up to you to figure out why. And herein lies the secret to what actually makes great organizations actually growing brainpower scales pretty well across teams. Engineers find their niches in your company that make you company what it is. The engineers, largely, enjoy that journey. It's part of what attracted them to engineering in the first place.

I guess what I'm saying is I'm not naive enough to think that there was ever a time that, en masse, companies cared about the journey to the product as much as the product. But what I am saying is that it used to be built in to the process. There was no way around it. And I guess we're going to find out what happens when it's not. But I'm more concerned with the human element. And I hope I always am.