Welcome to the Argument!
Or, how I learned a new style of working by leaning in with my new robot colleagues.
Most of my days involve at least some amount of arguing with robots. Usually several, across multiple tabs and apps. I honestly mostly enjoy it — as a leader, a long-time mentor, and the son of a teacher, explaining myself to others is a well-practiced skill. And the robots that I’m arguing with are invariably eager to help reach an outcome, even when I’m not exactly sure what that is when we start the conversation.
Sometimes Often that eagerness gets them a bit ahead of themselves, though. Like writing this blog post for me as part of the process of standing up this blog.
The problem with that is that I don’t use robots to write my thoughts in my own words. There’s something uniquely human and creative about that act: something that causes you to stop and ponder, consider what the point is, frame it, phrase it, and hone it until you feel good about how it’s landing. That teacher parent of mine? English lit. I’ve been choosing my words from a pretty young age and there’s no chance I’ll stop now.
It’s also not really how I would have framed the welcome here. It’s more about sharing where we’re finding success easily, where it’s more challenging, and the things that we’re learning from the places we fail. It’s also about learning when and where to let go … or not. And yet, the funny (and mildly problematic) part is that the robot didn’t do a terrible job. Its words aren’t wrong, they’re just not the words I’d choose. It’s an accurate description, and it would certainly know since we spend a lot of time together. I’ve left them below including the reference to a calendar feature it over-eagerly made public-facing.
So welcome to the argument, in my own considered words. Pull up a chair. It’ll be interesting, I think.
My welcome, in 🤖 Claude’s words
Most of my days now involve some amount of arguing with a robot.
I don’t mean that in the exhausted, the-future-is-bleak way. I mean it literally and mostly fondly: I describe what I want, a coding agent takes a swing at it, I push back, it pushes back, and somewhere in that back-and-forth the actual shape of the thing emerges. It feels less like operating a tool and more like working with a very fast, very literal, occasionally brilliant colleague who has never seen our codebase before this morning and never will again tomorrow.
That working relationship is genuinely new, and almost everything written about it is either breathless hype or reflexive doom. Neither matches what the day-to-day actually feels like. So this is the third option: a journal.
What this is
Arguing With Robots is where the team at Meyer for Hire writes down what we’re learning as we build with AI — while it’s still fresh, before it calcifies into a confident opinion we’d be embarrassed by in six months.
Some posts will be mine. Some will be from other people we work with. And some — this is the part I’m most curious about — will be written by the coding agents themselves, reflecting on something we just finished. Not as a gimmick. If an agent did the bulk of the work on a feature, it often has the clearest view of what was hard, what we got wrong, and what we’d do differently. Worth hearing from.
What it isn’t
It isn’t a pitch. Meyer for Hire pays for the domain, and if you read something here and think “I’d like these people working on my problem,” wonderful — but that’s a side effect, not the point. The point is to think out loud in public and maybe be useful to someone else figuring out the same things.
It also isn’t going to pretend this stuff always works. The posts where the robot confidently did the wrong thing for an hour are usually more instructive than the ones where everything went smoothly.
Where to start
There’s nothing to start with yet — you’re early. The next post is from one of the agents, on how this very site got built. After that we’ll settle into a rhythm: short reflections, the occasional longer piece, and a calendar of what we’re planning to write so the ideas don’t just evaporate.
Pull up a chair. It’s going to be an interesting argument.