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Notes -
I guess I find your theory of mind for managers to be kind of confusing. Like they're a different species of pointy haired Dilbert characters. The managers most pushing this in my org were originally coders themselves and have toyed around with the tools in their free time. Now, I do think they're a little out of touch to a degree, it's been a while since they've been in the code mines themselves and dealt with the reality of maintaining large code bases even when you were the one who wrote all the lines. But they're mostly smart people who want to help because our glory is their glory.
A lot of what they deal with day to day is getting their people the tools they need to do their jobs, whether it's AWS access, infrastructure licenses or now AI model and tooling access. For us to be allowed to use the tools at all is a result of them negotiating, moving budgets around and getting teams to build out infrastructure to allow it. They're pushing the use at the same time as they're coordinating to get the tools into our hands. By the time we're at the point of "why not just let the developers use the tools and determine for themselves if they're useful" there's already been hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars invested in making the tools available whether through contracts with the labs or man hours that come out of their budgets either way.
And the time us devs have to actually try them out and see how it goes is itself limited. In a way pushing for us to try it is their way of giving permission to spend work hours experimenting with them. I have several days on this two week cycle earmarked for experimenting with MCP servers to see if we can get agents the ability to query our database, without management signaling clearly that this is a priority it would be hard to justify that kind of use of my time.
Part of convincing you that all of this is rational might just be the empirical question of whether there's actual juice worth this squeeze. I've struggled to understand the people here who have such strong doubts about this. If it were a different forum that I cared less about I might just throw up my hands, things are moving pretty fast now and one way or the other the truth will assert itself soon enough. But I've seen the results, I've used the tools, there might be over reach but if the alternative is under reach then the choice seems very rational to me because there is just obviously value here.
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