I wonder if Engineering Managers have this same fear, or they’re used to having to distribute complex tasks to senior engineers and gamble with seeming less risky tasks to juniors that may leave ticking time bombs in their code. Just the nature of code written by agents or humans?
Yes, that definitely happens as an EM. You want your Senior/Staff engineers to architect out the new high-risk functionality into a doc for review. Then that Staff engineer either implements or has a junior/senior under their wing helping implement some of the scaffolding.
In this [common] paradigm the Staff Engineer acts as a architect/programmer and project manager in one. The EM should be there to guide and unblock.
Yes, that is absolutely a dynamic in managing an engineering team, and I'd argue that knowing the right person to give a particular task to, and how much detail they're going to need to get it done, is what separates good engineering managers from bad ones.
This is a great idea! I’d be curious to learn more about your setup, particularly how it asks your family and follows up with further questions? Does it do it based on a graph of your family it builds real time? Or is it smart enough that you just prompt it to “follow up with more questions”? I’m having a hard time imagining it asking my family engaging questions they won’t just say, “I don’t remember”.
That’s a good point. I think I saw Together.ai with that offering, but for some reason just never think to throw random non urgent coding tasks at it overnight
I use local models for asking about personal financial or health data that I want to keep local and private. Or even just whipping up quick and dirty prototypes for whatever I can think of but not seriously enough to spend tokens that I rather use on real projects.
Yeah I think there’s benefits to third-party providers being able to run the large models and have stronger guarantees about ZDR and knowing where they are hosted! So Open Weights for even the large models we can’t personally serve on our laptops is still useful.
Out of curiosity, why do you like gemini-cli better than claude or codex? And do you have any comparisons to opencode or pi?
Personally I've really liked OpenCode's TUI, but maybe on a superficial level of "this looks good and feels ergonomic to me".
Gemini cli felt clunky for me when I tried a while ago, but maybe it's better now? I do like how it's open source and I'm wondering if it can be made as model agnostic as OpenCode.
I don't really see or feel a difference in a lot of the the cli tooling, however, for development work Gemini is just hands down better. And I pay for ultra, and while that's not cheap, I know I can just use it however long I want for whatever I want and I'll never go past the price I pay unlike some API key only models.
Nice! With Anthropic and OpenAI lowering usage limits that’s a big deal. I’ve been considering a Gemini subscription because I’m already paying for the Google storage plan and it would only be $10 a month more for me.
Do you use Gemini 3.1 pro or the flash model or just auto? Any feelings about quality vs other models?
I wonder if Engineering Managers have this same fear, or they’re used to having to distribute complex tasks to senior engineers and gamble with seeming less risky tasks to juniors that may leave ticking time bombs in their code. Just the nature of code written by agents or humans?
reply