February 12, 2026
Bots, beef, and burnout
Ask HN: Are you using an agent orchestrator to write code?
Yegge says “build your bot boss”; devs split between hype, headaches, and job-scare vibes
TLDR: Steve Yegge urged devs to stop dabbling and start building their own tools to command multiple AI assistants, calling lightweight use “sorry.” The crowd split: some barely use agents and call gatekeeping, others predict teams shrinking fast, while many say the real choke point is deployment, not code generation.
Steve Yegge just tossed a match into the dev pit: stop the “sorry” routine of poking chatbots and checking in code, and go full throttle—build your own “orchestrator,” a homegrown tool that coordinates multiple AI assistants. In the Ask HN thread reacting to his chat with The Pragmatic Engineer, the crowd was anything but chill.
On one side, skeptics rolled their eyes. User slopinthebag basically said, “No thanks,” preferring lightweight helpers to write or tweak code and dropping the deadpan: “I feel bad for Yegge.” Another anti-hype camp argued the real enemy isn’t typing speed—it’s shipping cleanly. Jolux fired the ops flare: Claude already does enough, the bottleneck is deploying and not breaking things. Translation: you can have ten robot interns, but production will still eat your lunch.
Meanwhile, the doomers/optimizers showed up with a megaphone. Bitwize predicted that with serious automation, whole engineering teams could shrink to five people in a year or two. That got a lot of side-eye and nervous chuckles—“five engineers in a trench coat” jokes included. Some tossed in a lighter flex—whattheheckheck praised VS Code’s agent mode as “pretty slick”—but the mood stayed spicy.
The final vibe check? Yegge’s “build your bot boss” vision is either the next level or an anxiety machine. Gatekeeping vs. personal workflow became the sub-plot, with andy_ppp reminding everyone to pick what keeps them sane—not what wins internet points.
Key Points
- •The post cites Steve Yegge’s interview in The Pragmatic Engineer criticizing minimal AI-assisted coding practices.
- •Yegge advocates integrating LLMs deeply into development workflows, beyond sporadic tool use.
- •His AI Coding chart’s top level (“Level 8”) involves building an orchestrator to manage multiple agents.
- •The author states their workplace still follows a conservative, ad-hoc AI usage approach.
- •The post asks practitioners about using agent orchestrators on non-greenfield projects and SDLC impacts.