"Contrast that with a knowledge worker that's more of an artisan in this analogy. For them they aren't running a factory but instead watching a robot do the work they used to do while they sit idle and watch it".

I think your general thesis about how AI is used of agents vs. the general chat interface is true, but not the rest.

Your knowledge worker example is where people fail when using AI, and it is usually very obvious.

Knowledge workers who know what they're doing recognized very quickly that AI often goes down very bad rabbit holes, often cites incorrect sources, makes up sources, or will use a random Facebook source or Reddit post as an authority on some topic. In legal circles you have to fight it to understand what venue(s) apply and to get it to stick to the right ones, in medical research it will sometimes pull in crackpot papers from left field and intermix them with well defined research.

People in the knowledge realm caught on very quickly that you have to use AI iteratively and constantly back check what you get and correct it. Let it run on its own and it will give you a legal theory based on some weird case in Kentucky that has no bearing to your issue with a court in Vermont.

I don't personally know of any software engineers using AI as "fleets of agents" in a "factory." Sounds like a nightmare.

We have 5 star restaurants, fast food and street meat yet we still have kitchens. We can go to the super market to buy eggs, and produce yet I know people who have gardens to grow their own food and a scant few have chickens for eggs.

I don't actually use AI much at all simply because in my line of work the knowledge is industry specific and niche - an AI can't tell you how to fix a proprietary machine. I have used it a few times but to do dumb things like write some Excel script or some other piece of software I have no interest or need for learning.

I think you are onto something. I think most agents I have up is two and even that I am not super comfortable not carefully managing. Otoh, buddy has agents galore running his network and everything giving him updates in near real time. I just.. don't have that much .. I want to say faith, but that suggests unshakeable religious belief.. confidence. I don't have that kind of confidence. There is too much stuff connected now ( taxes, projects, work, fun ). I am slowly starting to separate everything even that takes some careful planning.

Devs are just early. What you describe knowledge workers doing is what devs did a year (or two) ago and in fact my dev colleagues still use it like that. Web interface with a chat, copy pasting code.

It’s a phase.

AI is not an abstraction, so any programmer who thinks they’re “moving up the stack” is fundamentally mistaken.

That's because current AI models are incapable of doing knowledge workers' jobs. At least for me as an attorney, Harvey is only actually useful when it comes to helping me sort through large amounts of data. Even then, I can't trust its judgment (it has shown to be very poor) so it's only so useful

I use the AI in the "knowledge worker" way you described. However I still feel it's augmenting my work, because I don't ask or expect it to make decisions for me. I use it to gather sources, to criticize my ideas, to generate summaries targeted to people expectations, and so on. Yes of course it's gonna influence my work with their own biases, but I don't think it is that important - my own biases are otherwise still there...

The centaur / reverse-centaur is another interesting way to describe this split.

This looks like the classic "AI can do everybody else's job but mine still needs me".

I know knowledge workers who throw what you give them into the slop machine and return the slop, but I don't need them, I can feed the slop machine myself. I still need those who have experience and taste that the machine hasn't got yet.