Once upon a time there were engineers that used software. Just like any other tool, and usually in combination with electronic, electrical and mechanical equipment, all of them being very well aware of the laws governing it all.

But it was so great as a tool that some engineers didn't want to deal with the burdens and limitations of the physical world, and started focusing on software more and more.

Then the software engineers came, for whom the physical and mathematical aspect of the whole thing was just a distant history lesson (and preferably a problem in someone else's computer).

And after software engineers, the only constant in the entire ordeal will remain: engineering, in a shape or form that very likely nobody can predict right now.

I really love using AI to code but more and more I wonder ... Are things really that different? So I guess I'm the business as usual type.

I think on the frontend side we're going to see a lot more scope for teams.

On a backend infra side it seems as hard as ever. Still have to think really hard problems, think deeply about data structure and flow, and deal with second- and third-order effects. Or even harder because the models like to confidently lie.

The harder question is how we train people but that doesn't seem insurmountable either. Most of us cut our teeth as junior engineers somewhere, implementing tasks that Claude can now do without breaking a sweat but was that really the most efficient way to train and learn?

I've been thinking about this since ChatGPT arrived.

My thoughts are distilled in a single page:

https://devarch.ai/trio-paradigm.html

I doubt we will ever need a large team to build software again. PMs will be fractional. Product owners and subject matter experts will become more valuable. And engineers that have deep experience with things like Domain-Driven Design will thrive and vibe coders will eventually be shut out of bigger roles.

There are people who make handmade watches in Switzerland and people who push buttons and trigger automations on assembly lines for mass manufactured watch companies in Vietnam.

The guy in Switzerland enjoys his life more, their labor has more leverage and is generally more valued across the world.

You all have a choice. Handmade software isnt going anywhere.

In fact this is all a trick to decrease the bargaining power of your labor, turn you into a de-skilled button pusher and a slave to anyone willing to pay you a morsel. Dont fall for it.

I've definitely noticed a distinct lack of pride now that Claude Code is writing 90% of the code I'm delivering these days. For simple problems (which most are) it works well enough and you are definitely shipping code faster - and with actual test coverage to boot. But it just doesn't feel the same - there's little craftsmanship and honestly it's boring as fuck. You spend a lot of time setting up guardrails and having it produce plans that you then have to refactor multiple times. It's impressive that LLMs can do this, but it's not particularly enjoyable. I guess I was a "writing code was the fun part" guy.

Semi-related, but I really want to see the long term maintenance outcomes of all code being produced by these software engineers that were apparently just closeted project managers. I feel like having 50% of the engineers in this industry just telling Claude Code, "yeah that looks good to me" 150 times a day is going to result in an incredible amount of software rewriting.

Engineers are not going anywhere, they are going to fill the spaces outside of coding that are still critical to shipping new product.

Here is a post that summarizes what I mean: https://substack.com/home/post/p-200064883

I've been both types on and off and on for my whole career. At times, very engrossed in the technology itself - but I got started because I needed tools for my job that didn't exist so I learned how to build them. I've also developed and maintained open source software - some of it very much for its own sake as a technology - some of it quite utilitarian.

Understanding of product and business has always differentiated me though, and this is why I've never really stressed about any of this.

Another thing I've noticed - most developers are really bad at reviewing code - whether AI wrote it or not. Its really hard to make your brain sink in deep enough to really evaluate what you are looking at. I think a lot of developers never - or almost never - find bugs based on code inspection alone. Once they are written - there is often no other practical way to confirm that tests actually test what they claim to other than inspection. And bugs in design are still very costly in this new world.

As long as any human still has an edge in any aspect of the software development process - people who can force themselves to really think through proposed designs, test plans and cases and code will be really valuable.

Nothing. There will be more of us than ever as the amount of money each engineer can generate goes up. I’m not sure why everyone comes to the conclusion that there will be less engineers as productivity increases. We aren’t that expensive relative to the value we generate and AI, when wielded by an expert, will exponentially increase the amount of return a single engineer can generate.

They're going to be overworked.

In the old days we programmed systems by literally wiring them. There wasn't much work, only a few "programmers" were employed. Then somebody came up with Punch cards that was much more vision than wiring the systems directly. This opened the door for a lot more people to use them and now programmers were busier.

The punch cards didn't scale either so eventually we created panels with buttons so we could type the programs into the computers. That was more efficient and now all the sudden it lowered the bar entry and more people who are employed and doing the work.

Assembly language to machine code compilers to assembly language high-level languages and LLMs.

Every time developing software gets easier, it only increases the amount of work required. I'm busier today than I've ever been in my entire life.

What's going to happen to software engineers? They're going to be overworked and they're going to be given more work and the cycle will never end.

But has software engineering really changed that much? I've barely had any regular fulltime work experience most of my career has been contracting, so I’m not sure.It seems like the perceived change varies depending on the environmen

What I don’t get is using AI agents feels basically the same as what I used to do with legacy codebases of 100k–200k lines—understanding the codebase and making partial fixes or adding features. To me, it feels like nothing has changed.

Most of my career has been about finding parts that won't break within the overall code structure—without necessarily knowing the entire detailed specification—and adding features or fixing bugs there. So I feel like it's no different from finding and fixing small issues and bugs in a large codebase written by AI.

Of course, when delivering a solution that's 70,000–80,000 lines long, there is a change things that used to rely on templates and CMS tools can now be created more diversely using AI. But aside from that, I don't think things have changed as much as people say. It might be different for those who build things entirely from scratch with AI, though.

My code writing ability has declined, but I'm not really seeing a dramatic change in workflow

Now I work with code written by AI, adding features and modifying it… Most of the codebases I’ve seen were bad anyway—there was no good code to begin with. When coding with AI, I split tasks into P0, P1, P2 based on importance. For P0, I write everything myself. For P1, I write the draft and AI implements it. For P2, AI implements everything. For P0, I only handle things that involve responsibility, like payment logic or login logic.

I don't participate in open source, so I don’t see big changes. The only thing I notice is that AI speeds things up a lot—for things I used to understand by reading documentation and examples, now I can generate them much faster. Personally, I wish open source projects had more simple, short examples in their code

Four day working weeks would be nice.

I really liked reading through the Mars trilogy. It imagined a world where AI is used for fluent effortless translation - local languages get a renaissance since now you _dont_ need a lengua Franca, everyone just speaks what they like the most, and can understand everyone else. Much more “flavour” to human interaction.

Also ai makes things just resource constrained, not labour - whatever you imagined, you could make happen, just needed to “talk to an ai” about it. Lots of terraforming Mars / Venus in that book were imagined like that.

But it also analysed the social / political / behavioural aspects of it. Places that had to preserve old power structures - aka US/Europe/China - got engulfed with mega corps controlling everything etc.

But Mars - where people had enough freedom to imagine something different, came up with political/financial structures to incorporate all of that, and thrived.

I think it tried to play the card of “if US was being created right now - what would its ideals be” If you had a huge tract of land that was “free” and nobody (powerful enough) claiming it, and a population that didn’t yet have strong allegiances and could be persuaded to band together, what would AI, tech and all these years of progress allow us as humans to achieve politically.

Which also makes you feel kinda sad for the US in that world - it is the old rusted power center that can’t innovate and is stuck in the past…

Now it’s only sci fi of course, but it was quite interesting to imagine a world where AI gets smarter and smarter but never reaches that “sentient” threshold. I think the whole trilogy aged incredibly well all things considered.