foo for thought

The final piece clicked in recently. I get all the cool shiny things at Microsoft, so I requested and got access to Microsoft Scout, Microsoft’s experimental OpenClaw fork that hooks up with all the Microsoft things (ie, everything at my job). So now, instead of Claude Code prompts, my prompts to this are:

• Here’s the backlog item – do it.
• There’s comments on my PR, can you fix them?
• Can we implement the thing that was talked about in Teams today?

If that looks like my entire job as a software engineer to you, you’d be right! For the record, I’m not “outing” myself or anything, my team is fully aware I’m diving in head first to all of this AI nonsense. But, I’ve basically been replacing my entire work with Microsoft Scout + other AI chatbots and, I guess what I can say is, I did not go to college for this, that’s for sure. If you would tell 19 year old Jared that you’d be commanding a robot to do all of the coding for you, I might have had a change of heart when it came to career path! But, we’re here now… lovely isn’t it!

I can’t say it’s been perfect. On older versions of Scout it’d mark PR comments as done when it didn’t do anything, forget to implement things it’s going to, and frequently mess up commands. I’m finally up to date, and it’s still not providing 100% optimal fixes which, is a great relief to me! At least I’m good for something!

One thing an AI-first development or job process does to you fundamentally is something which I’ve found interesting – you still have to know what it’s doing. I cannot tell you how humiliating it is when I get more than 2 questions about code that I didn’t write that I didn’t look over either (yeah, I’ve been there). It turns out even though you’re offloading the work to a computer, you still have to know what kind of work is going on to communicate with people! (for now…) Also because again… it’s not perfect. I still have a job, and hopefully I will… keep the job…

Obviously it’s not running on Fable 5 (rip), but I can only imagine how much more useful Scout would be with a Fable-like model in the pipeline. For now though, Opus 4.8 is a beast and can reason over an insane amount of context. WorkIQ that Microsoft made also really helps – allowing the AI to seamlessly go through all my documents and stuff to get the important information.

I guess I don’t really know what else to say, and if it feels like this is just doom posting, it absolutely is! I’m not going to give you “tips” to use this human-job-slayer more effectively, suddenly it became much more real and I’m scared now! Also, I feel like there’s less of a need to hone prompt engineering now with just how good these models got.

Just wanted to update you all on how insane this has been! I wouldn’t be surprised if software engineering goes extinct in a year, I also wouldn’t be surprised if it still existed but in a new form. But one thing’s for sure – this is not what we went to college for, and if you still think it is then uh, you’re gonna have a rude awakening eventually!