Oration on Agents and being crushed by responsibility

The intention of this note is to become a blog post:

Raw Recording #

Okay, this is the oration for a blog post, maybe an open letter of sorts, as I am just wrestling with my new job and the responsibilities that either are put on me or that I’ve put on myself as the world is changing. And software development and software engineering and code writing is just changing, thanks to AI, thanks to agents and their introduction into the corporate environment. The internet is full of opinions and ideas that push and pull and prod people in different directions. And every one of those ideas has contexts, which is necessary to keep in mind when filtering the ideas. At a smaller startup where you can have a $200 a month Claude Code subscription for all of your engineers, that’s gonna yield certain results that’s going to encourage and invite certain people into that space to use those tools, the clawed tools, or Gemini or Codex. I work at a big company, Caterpillar. We have a GitHub co-pilot, but through co-pilot we have access to the kind of frontier large language models. From there, we have access to the co-pilot harness, whether it’s co-pilot CLI or the co-pilot integration with Visual Studio code, or the other IDEs like JetBrains, et cetera. Out there in the world, he has certain opinions from some people. You have people who are very pro agents like Steve Yeage, who has been a big influence to me over the last several months, as I’ve definitely jumped into the deep end of agentic coding. I haven’t even really opened my IDD in months, except for small things that I want to do by hand. enterprise grade work for the last three months or so and maybe a little longer has been fully written and produced by agents and i’ve been using AI to write code to some capacity or another since chad gpt came out really since like claude sonnet 3.5 but this thinking that i am doing is It’s really supposed to be about me, so this blog post I want to write is me processing thoughts on the expectation change that’s placed on developers in certain environments for certain types of work. I guess even that, like that sounds kind of vague. So I can only speak to myself. So I need to put a big annotation and plaster this blog post with this big caveat message that this is me, this is my experience, this is my position, and this is not a truth that is wide reaching. It’s not any kind of prediction on the, you know, the larger change happening in the world. This is just where I am at. So maybe for the post to make sense, I need to give a brief amount of history about me and my work. I’m not a trained software engineer, but I’ve been, I guess I’ve been a pretty impressive asset in my employment. I’ve been at Caterpillar for nine years, and in that nine years or over in the last several years, I’ve moonlit, moonlighted a little bit. And at every place I’ve done any other amount of work, I’ve just consistently impressed people. Now, this really just leads me to have more imposter syndrome because I know or I have learned what impresses people, And it isn’t necessarily excellence, although I try to do things well and I want to solve problems and maintain the systems that I build to solve those problems. But I don’t write the best code. I’m not the smartest developer. I don’t know the most. I get to know the things I work with and I learn a lot and I work fast because I have Not a super unique, but a rare ability to focus in, when the stars align, to focus and produce more than the next person. Not every next person, but a lot of the next people, a lot of the people I work with, I outperform. And that’s been true, or it has seemed true, from every review, pretty much every review I’ve ever received, that’s been true. And as I’ve had that just personal truth be reflected in my work, it’s been enhanced with AI because I’ve been an early adopter and even as a, even as somewhat of a skeptic, like I’ve tried to maintain a posture of skepticism. But since Opus 4.5, Even though I might talk like a skeptic, I am leaning into agents hard. And I am practicing my own harness engineering with my nexus project. And I’m using it to do engineering work at Caterpillar that’s going into production for us, which is like data platform type of work. It’s not custom, it’s not external customer facing. It’s internal tooling, which is what I mostly built. And the thing I’m really trying to wrap my head around, or I guess I’m trying to explain, is without AI, I was out producing a lot of people. And with AI, you can produce just a shit ton of code. And I’m trying to do that part well, but in my own gifts and curses of hyper focus and Wanting to meet expectations and solve problems, I’m jumping into the new frontier very quickly. But something I’ve noticed is that as I’ve produced a lot, people are just impressed. And they’re not necessarily impressed with the excellence. They’re impressed with how I talk about things. They’re impressed with how much I do, and they’re impressed with the output they see. But the result of a bunch of code isn’t all of the code itself. And I haven’t read all the code I’ve produced with agents. I’ve certainly tried to test most of it or had most of it tested. But as I’ve sought to do this and as I’ve been working in this capacity of using agents very heavily, I just feel kind of torn. in trusting the agents and in working with the agents in the ways that I think are appropriate, but also collaborating with other humans who are also using AI. But are they using AI in a trustworthy way? I don’t know, and I’m not sure how to validate it. But my managers seem to think I know how to validate it, and they seem impressed with the work I do, and they seem impressed with my understanding of AI and agentic coding. And so I feel all of this pressure to continue to be a top performer like I have been since before AI. I feel a lot of pressure to, I don’t want to coach people in how I do things, but I’m being asked to coach people and how I do things because other people I work with notice me. And I guess I’m almost, I’m just kind of tired of being noticed. Because being noticed is not resulting in me becoming rich. And money is not the most important thing. But man, I’d love to just make enough money to fuck off for the rest of my life and never look at a computer ever again. I would love… to not have to continue to maintain systems that I build or that other people build or to collaborate with people I don’t know, who might not even be long term. That’s the one thing about Caterpillar is I’m working with a lot of contractors. And nothing wrong with contracting, I’ve done that. Nothing wrong with being a contractor, but They could disappear at any moment, and all the code that they write, and even today, all the code that they prompt and have an agent right becomes my problem, my maintenance issue, my responsibility. And it just is, It’s just making me nervous to maintain and to understand and to continue to work under conditions that I can’t even tell if I’m making them for myself or if they’re real expectations. Like if I fell off the face of the earth or if I dropped agentic coding entirely and I just went back to coding by hand completely, would my output continue to impress people today? I don’t know the answer to that. But I certainly wouldn’t be solving problems as fast, but would I be creating less problems? Like I’ve solved a lot of problems in three months in my new role here with Forge. But I don’t know how many problems I’ve created. Only time will tell. And the thing is, the guys I work with who are contractors, they might not be around long enough for time to tell, but because I’m not rich yet, I probably will be long enough, or be around long enough. to experience those bugs and those problems that I don’t know about yet. And I am just feeling so much pressure to be the best and to be the one to solve problems. And I don’t know if I’m putting it on me or if cat’s putting it on me or if my project manager is putting it on me. I’m just really struggling with the amount of responsibility I feel. And I’m feeling frustrated about it because that amount of responsibility feels like it has scaled a lot with agents, with AI, but not my paycheck. And in fact, my paycheck has gone down quite a bit. And I’m not more relaxed. I’m making about half of what I’ve made over the last couple of years. And I’m not more relaxed. I don’t feel freer. I don’t feel like I have 50% of the responsibility that I did. Cal Autonomy awoke something in me for purpose, but that feels like it’s already starting to die. I’m already tired. I’m, I don’t know about burnt out, but I’m tired. I was reviewing some code that one of these contractors I’m working with. It’s actually only an intern. He’s not even a contractor. He’s an intern. And I’m reviewing a pull request of his. And damn, it’s a lot of code. And it looks somewhat useful. But I don’t know exactly how to test it. That’s not true actually, I do know how to test it, but I don’t own enough of our infrastructure at Caterpillar to test it easily. So do I trust him? Do I trust his prompt? Do I trust his harness? Do I trust the tests that I have already put in the code base to capture and block any breakages he might have introduced with this code for the code I’ve already been producing? It’s different when I’m intimately familiar with the code base. And I’ve been, I don’t know, definitely two other places at least where I had very intimate familiarity with the system and with the code and with the platform. But the one I’m on right now is new, and I built it. I built it with agents. I built it to replace a thing that was never even working. But I built it. It’s mine. It’s not somebody else’s. It’s not that we’ll document it. There’s a lot of documentation, but it’s all been agent produced, and even though I’ve reviewed it, it’s hard for me to organize it in the right way in a way that makes sense. I’m just feeling so frustrated that it seems like, as the tools are getting better, as developers are able to move faster, it feels like I am expected to move faster. but I’m not expected to make any more money. I’m not expected to be compensated anymore for the increase in velocity and responsibility. It’s almost like if I could produce, this metric is not gonna be real, but let’s just, for the sake of argument, make it up. If I can write 30,000 lines of code in a year and make $100,000, I feel fine about that, whatever that number means. But now I can actually produce 300,000 lines of code in a year. I’m definitely producing 10 times more code than normal. I don’t know if I’m doing 10 times more engineering, but I am making exactly the same amount of money. And so why did I do it? Why am I leaning into it so hard? Why am I trying to still be the front runner to be on the bleeding edge when caterpillar is not going to pay anymore? And I could go somewhere else. I could go to Avant. I could make more. It’s a system I’m familiar with. It’s even people I know. And there’s AI there too. But it’s a system I know. It’s a system I know how to support and maintain. And there’s not an expectation that I’m going to produce 10,000 lines of code this week. But right now at Caterpillar, it feels like I am expected to write 10,000 lines of code this week. And deploy it and maintain it and solve new problems. All in an incredibly political and hectic, chaotic environment where there isn’t an appropriate amount of leadership over me. I am the expert in AI in my group. And that feels retarded. I am the professional agentic engineer and that is just scary because I’m not good enough to be that. I’m not Steve Yeagie, I’m not Simon Willison, I haven’t been a developer for 20 years. I’m just a guy who learned some Python to solve some problems and happen to work faster than a lot of people and that reputation has really It’s treated me well for sure. And my disposition to problem solving has, up until recently, I felt like I had been, like I’ve been compensated well by my company, but then I’ve also been able to do more work outside of one job for me to feel the value of my own skills. But now with AI changing everything, Can I show you what’s on the back of my story? It feels like I’ve given up the personal gains. One second, Alia. So I’ve given up personally realizing the benefit of my own skill. And now I am like in a position where Caterpillar, and only Caterpillar, is reaping the benefit of my new scheme in agentic engineering. And I think that’s just ticking me off because I stayed with Catt to do something good for the world. And I think we can do something good for the world. But I’m tired.

Notes and Summarization #

Possible Titles #

• Agents, Responsibility, and the Cost of Going Faster
• The Irony of 10x
• More Output, Less Upside
• When AI Made Me Faster and Poorer
• Being Crushed by Responsibility

Working Angle #

This should probably be a personal essay, not a manifesto about AI. The core tension:

• agents made me dramatically more productive
• that productivity increased the responsibility I carry
• the financial upside I used to realize personally has gone down, not up

Section Stub: Opening Scene #

Prompt:

• Start with a concrete moment. Maybe reviewing a massive PR from the intern / contractor side of the system.
• What did I feel in that moment: confusion, dread, pressure, responsibility, skepticism?
• What was the specific thought: “I might own all of this later, even if I did not really produce or validate all of it myself.”
• Can I open with one sharp sentence that names the tension right away?

Possible opener idea:

“Agentic coding has made me faster than ever, but it has also made me feel responsible for more than I can honestly hold in my head.”

Section Stub: This Is About Me, Not Everyone #

Prompt:

• Add a strong caveat early: this is not prediction, prescription, or universal truth.
• Name my context: big company, internal platform work, political environment, mixed team ownership, frontier models via Copilot.
• What about my temperament matters here? Hyperfocus, initiative, problem solving, pressure sensitivity, desire to meet expectations.
• What would I want a reader to not mishear?

Section Stub: Who I Was Before Agents #

Prompt:

• Briefly describe my work history and self-understanding.
• I am not formally trained, so what made me valuable anyway?
• What does it mean that people were impressed before AI too?
• Pull in relevant threads from pages/blog/forge-ahead.md: prior projects, practical problem solving, being useful, learning systems by doing.
• What gifts do I think God gave me that made me effective before this shift?

Questions to answer:

• What kind of worker was I before agents entered my workflow?
• What did I already know how to do well?
• What part of my value came from focus rather than brilliance?

Section Stub: Why I Leaned Into Agentic Coding #

Prompt:

• Explain that I did not stumble into this accidentally; I chose to go hard.
• Why did it feel natural to me to adopt agents aggressively?
• What about the mission at Caterpillar Autonomy made the leap feel worth it?
• Pull in pages/blog/cat-autonomy-2-0.md: I stayed because the work felt meaningful, not merely because it was interesting.
• Mention harness engineering / Nexus / experimentation if it helps show this was a deliberate investment.

Questions to answer:

• Why did I trust this direction enough to reorganize my work around it?
• Was I chasing novelty, usefulness, recognition, mission, or all of the above?

Section Stub: What Actually Changed #

Prompt:

• Describe the practical change in my day-to-day work.
• I am no longer mainly writing code line by line; I am directing, reviewing, testing, and integrating generated work.
• What changed about the quantity of output?
• What changed about how coworkers and managers perceived me?
• What changed about the kind of questions people started asking me?

Questions to answer:

• When did I realize this was not just autocomplete, but a new mode of working?
• What does “enterprise-grade work fully written and produced by agents” actually mean in practice?

Section Stub: The Hidden Cost of Speed #

Prompt:

• Write about the gap between output and understanding.
• I can ship more, but I do not always know the code as intimately as hand-written systems I built before.
• Testing is not the same as ownership.
• Documentation existing is not the same as confidence.
• What kinds of future problems does speed create?

Questions to answer:

• What do I know I have not fully read?
• What kinds of bugs or maintenance traps am I afraid I am creating?
• What does it feel like to build something that works but still feels partially foreign?

Section Stub: Responsibility Without Clear Boundaries #

Prompt:

• This may be the emotional center before the money section.
• Describe the contractor / intern dynamic and why it intensifies the burden.
• Their output can become my long-term maintenance problem.
• The organization sees me as someone who understands AI and agents, so responsibility pools onto me.
• Ask whether the pressure is explicit or self-imposed, but note that the body feels it either way.

Questions to answer:

• Who is actually accountable when AI-assisted code breaks six months from now?
• What does it mean to be treated like the local expert when I do not feel like one?
• Why is being noticed beginning to feel costly instead of rewarding?

Section Stub: The Financial Irony #

Prompt:

• State this clearly and concretely.
• For years, I realized more value from my output because I worked two jobs concurrently.
• Due to the new role, new responsibility, and the demands of agentic coding in this environment, I had to go down to one job.
• So the irony is: the tools make me dramatically more productive, but I personally realize less economic upside from my own gifts and skills than I did before.
• Keep this grounded and honest, not whiny.

Questions to answer:

• What exactly have I lost financially?
• Why does this feel bigger than “I want more money”?
• Where do the gains of AI go when an individual contributor gets faster?
• If I can now produce 10x more code, why does my life not feel lighter, freer, or better compensated?

Possible thesis sentence:

“Agentic coding increased the value I create at work, while decreasing the share of that value I personally get to realize.”

Section Stub: Mission, Meaning, and Fatigue #

Prompt:

• Reaffirm the good: this is meaningful work, and that matters to me.
• Tie back to autonomy, safety, and the reasons I stayed at Caterpillar.
• Then tell the truth: meaning does not cancel fatigue.
• What has already started to feel tired, dulled, or overdrawn in me?

Questions to answer:

• What purpose did this role awaken in me?
• Why does that sense of purpose already feel threatened?
• How do I talk honestly about fatigue without pretending I am fully burned out if I am not sure?

Section Stub: Questions I Cannot Yet Answer #

Prompt:

• Let the essay breathe here instead of forcing a neat conclusion.
• Gather the real unresolved questions.
• If I stopped using agents, would I still impress people?
• Would I solve fewer problems or create fewer future ones?
• Am I carrying real expectations or anticipated ones?
• Is this making me a better engineer, or just a faster source of output and responsibility?

Section Stub: Conclusion #

Prompt:

• End modestly, not with a manifesto.
• I am not anti-AI.
• I am not saying agents are bad.
• I am trying to tell the truth about what this transition has cost me personally.
• Land on the mismatch between speed, responsibility, and reward.

Possible closing direction:

• The tools are real.
• The gains are real.
• The responsibility is real.
• The redistribution of value is also real.
• I am still trying to understand what faithfulness looks like inside that tension.

Material To Weave In #

• My lack of formal software engineering background
• My history of being useful by solving practical problems quickly
• My tendency toward hyperfocus and over-responsibility
• The shift from hand-written confidence to agent-mediated uncertainty
• The contractor / intern maintenance concern
• The drop from two incomes to one
• The irony that Cat benefits more from my increased output than I do
• The Christian framing around calling, providence, stewardship, and fatigue

Things To Avoid #

• sounding like I am making universal claims about all AI use
• sounding bitter without being specific
• centering line-count metrics too much without translating them into responsibility
• pretending I have fully landed on a conclusion
• making this a complaint post about coworkers instead of a reflection on burden and change