Synthesists

I like hunting science fiction for references to what is happening right now. In Peter Watts's "Blindsight" the protagonist is a "synthesist": his job is translating from the language of transhuman scientists who have moved so far ahead that their ordinary meatbag ancestors can no longer wrap their heads around the concepts.

In our reality, it looks like the synthesists will have to be us, the IT crowd (assuming we survive the ride), except instead of transhumans we get LLMs of varying degrees of derangement.

On my project, Claude not only writes the code but also runs the issue tracker (in Russian, which deserves a post of its own).

Here is an actual ticket title:

"The stream accumulator glues together a repeated tool-name delta: publish_apppublish_app, and the error blames the model for a name we corrupted ourselves".

Then the boss walks in and asks: so what is it you actually do here? That is where your real work begins.