>e.g. front-end web development

It's kind of funny that you say this, because I am a frontend developer and I tend to see the state of the art as being very good at doing the boring behind-the-scenes plumbing that I don't care about, and not great at doing the kind of bespoke design work that my day job's clients want.

I'm not saying that either of us are definitively right or wrong, and I agree that having a more generalist skillset is probably the best way to succeed in this new era; I'm just pointing out that LLMs don't really own any part of the stack so thoroughly that specialists in that segment will just go away.

I think we're not too many years away from the end state of software. We already collectively produce more software than anyone really wants, and the bulk of it is anywhere between garbage and outright fraud, if not actively malicious.

The end state, I think, is that everyone who needs small software to manage a todo list or synchronize files, or whatever "normal" people do, will end up with bespoke personalized software written by their own AI. SWEs will be reduced to working on only the big corporate projects.

The overwhelming trend in commercial software these past few decades has been hyper-aggressive anti-customization, anti-personalization, anti-user. Commercial software has been reduced to one single happy path and if that doesn't suit your needs, then fuck off. No one is making commercial software for everyday people. Even open source is trending away from everyday users.

Soon, regular everyday people who simply need some software to solve a problem the way they want it solved will have the ability to do so. In the bast majority of those cases, the quality and correctness of said software really doesn't matter. What matters is that it's personalized, free, and isn't an invasive surveillance/advertisement platform.

"The world’s appetite for software has been insatiable so far."

Yeah, I don't that does not necessarily mean everyone is looking for the latest and greatest. Many businesses are still reliant on technologies like custom spreadsheets and Microsoft Access because they do exactly what they want them to do, have a fixed rate, and rarely require any additional modifications/maintenance. Once you step outside of the bubble so many of us are stuck in you'll realize that many, many people aren't interested in upgrades, but rather they just want the old shit they know to just work.

> I don’t see any evidence of this happening, but if somebody wants to make this argument, they should be clear about why this time is different

It does seem to be happening - at least in mobile app stores.

There's some recent analysis that demonstrates how, despite a huge updraft in the quantity of apps released, the aggregate count of reviews and downloads remains static.

In other words, there are now many more apps. But not many (or really any?) more users

Take a look at p40 / figure 12 of "WRITING CODE VS. SHIPPING CODE: PRODUCTIVITY EFFECTS ACROSS GENERATIONS OF AI CODING TOOLS" (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35275/w352...)

Their analysis is on pg42-43

> they should be clear about why this time is different to the entire history of the computer industry so far

I can't prove the pie is fixed, but nor can you prove the pie is infinite.

Maybe this comes close to sounding patronising, but I think the key thing people miss, when talking about economic growth of software is, money has to come from somewhere. Someone has to give it to you. So it you want to keep growing, you need someone who isn't paying for software, to start. Who are these people, how much money do they have, and what other costs are you competing against?

> Firstly, we might finally become productive enough to exhaust the world’s appetite for software. I don’t see any evidence of this happening, but if somebody wants to make this argument, they should be clear about why this time is different to the entire history of the computer industry so far.

Not all software but how many movies you can watch, books read? Similarly how many games you can play? How many ads you can watch during a day?

Eventually projects will have to be profitable. And even if everybody will make a great game most of them won’t be profitable because you competing for limited eyeballs time

>Every time we do so, we are able to build bigger, better things more quickly.

Jervons Paradox

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

We all tend to assume AI will only ever be good at the execute part, but what if AI will also be good at decide-deliver? What if some day, we could put AI in charge of not only running a company, but coming up with a business idea, getting funded, driving sales, pivoting until product-market fit and then scaling?

Who would profit from such a company?

> at best you can have AI doing 90% of the work as long as an expert developer is driving things.

But that puts 90% of developers out of a job.

And I don't see why it couldn't become 99%.

Even if the budget for software development were to stay constant, if an ever increasing part of it is spent on llm usage, it will reduce the money left for developers, resulting in mass layoffs and/or mass salary cuts.

You can't expect that timeline to continue forever. AI is a whole different beast than programming. It is in fact what programming set out to be in the 1940s: A replica of the brain. Automating programming tasks has only gotten us so far, but that timeline is probably ending now. We no longer need to automate programming because we can talk to the machine.

>Specifically, AI+human developer no longer outperforms AI alone. So far, all the available evidence seems to show AI as a force multiplier for developers and that for good results

Or humans are relegated to the co-processor role. The AI does 99% of the thinking and work and consults the human for the 1% it needs. Whether that extra contribution is essentially a random number generation, creativity / outside the box input, or esoteric problem solving remains to be seen.

>We have been aggressively and enthusiastically automating away software engineering for the entire history of the computer industry. Every time we do so, we are able to build bigger, better things more quickly. When this happens, our work becomes more valuable and expectations rise to match. The world’s appetite for software has been insatiable so far. AI hasn’t replaced software engineers because every time we become more productive, the goalposts move.

Anytime we became more productive in the past we become in a way that didn't remove engineers, just increased the abstraction an engineer would work in. And we did it at times of rapid expansion of computing and internet, meaning way more need for engineers counter-balancing the increased productivity.

>The world’s appetite for software has been insatiable so far.

Has it? The expansion of IT has reached global saturation, we're getting desparate, and try to push shit like Blockchain and IoT, and shoving "smart" features even where people don't want them.

And the world is full of software nobody or very few care for or use/subscribe/buy. App Store have huge "long tails" of stuff nobody cares for.

And with autonomous agents we designed something to replace the engineer altogether. So even if the demand for software increases, that can be like "spawn more agents" not "get more developers".

Some human supervisors per N agents? Sure. Equal human demand as what's now? Unlikely.

In general "we did it 5 times, to we'll surely do it 6" is not a real argument, just a hope that something will never end.

> we might finally become productive enough to exhaust the world’s appetite for software.

I think we are past this point personally. Lots of blasphemously useless crap being built.

In every regime where we have meaningful longitudinal data about the long run outcomes of introducing technology that is superhuman at some or all of a human's job, the combination of the machine and an expert human outperforms either alone, with probably the clearest parallel structurally being chess, though this is true of all of the hard sciences and all of frontier engineering (semiconductor design).

There will never be a human who can beat Stockfish ever again, digital intelligence has simply accelerated away from human intelligence in that regime.

There is no other human alive who can beat Magnus Carlsen. Stockfish crushes Magnus.

But Magnus and Stockfish playing together crush any conceivable combination of just human or just computer. And no serious chess player would train without a computer or decline the assist if the contest mattered.

And this is in a regime where the dominance of the machine is total, structural, and permanent, far more so than any existing AI's impact on the outcome distribution of any recent development on any white-collar knowledge work include even the most sophisticated software engineering done anywhere. The demonstrated as opposed to completely conjectural lift on SWE outcomes with Claude Code (and even that's controversial, let's take the high end of the claims) is real and changes the geometry of the situation not at all.

Nor is there any apparent limit on how much arbitrarily sophisticated software the world has an appetite for, you could take someone at the absolute top of the field (I'm a big Carmack fan let's go with Carmack), and give him cutting edge AI assist, and the best program a person can write just got better. Sweet!

And this applies anywhere from junior to Carmack: however good they were, they're better now. We can build harder things. We can have extreme quality software where previously we were stuck with some Electron jank, across the board. Does anyone think Slack would lose market share if it went back to its gaming roots and was gorgeously 3D accelerated on every surface against a backend that could instant and perfectly synchronize an arbitrary workspace on a flakey cell connection and never have an outage or data loss? Or would they rapidly shred the remaining competition and become the favored tool of everyone?

In adversarial regimes like trading or drone warfare, you better believe the best hackers have arbitrary assist if you're going to play against them.

I think the thing to be hand-wringing about isn't AI, it's that capitalism no longer seems to be an adversarial regime. The worst software rivalries in the industry look more like a pillow fight than a battle of will.

And if there is any lasting reduction in headcount, it's leaders lacking ambition agreeing tacitly to not play very hard, not AI, that is to blame for that. None of the HFT shops nor amusingly the frontier labs have reduced their hiring or compensation at all. If anything, it's going up!

Quite a few developers will likely loose their jobs. In particular the ones who don't have mental capacity to work with models - the ones who are forever junior.

The engineers who can manage large scale projects using agents will, on the other hand, probably get a hefty salary bump.

I don't get this reasoning, and yet it is pervasive. Just because non-engineering people come up to you with apps they have created does not mean AI has or will replace software engineers.

Consider:

- I can read about my symptoms from Dr. Google, try a lifestyle change, herbal remedy, or over-the-counter drug, and that may actually work. This does not mean in the slightest that doctor are being made obsolete

- I can create music with generative AI, without needing any understanding of music theory, no taste for music, no creativity. This does not mean people with musical talent are being made obsolete at all.

- I can, with the help of AI, work on DIY projects around the house. This does not in any way mean engineers are being made obsolete.

Who will be helping domain experts to elucidate what they actually need through prototype-refine cycles? Who will be writing and maintaining the operating systems, the languages, the version control systems, th editors and terminal emulators, knowledge/document management systems, the PaaS platforms, etc that these hordes of hobbyist software creators depend on?

Have these people actually properly tested their creations to ensure they are robust? Do they even understand the edge cases that could arise? Is their work secure? Cooking up some quick thing based on some prompt does not equate to engineering whatsoever.

Perhaps you fail to see this because, like many others, you subscribe to the fallacy that the value of software engineering primarily lies in the code produced itself, the arrangements of bits manufactured. It is not; a project is primarily valuable as a theory and abstraction building process. See https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf

Generation and maintenance are very different beasts.

There are engineers that work making a 2 weeks app that is never revisited again, I guess, but I don't know anyone that makes a living from that. Maybe the "WordPress site for your business" gigs.

The issue comes when you have 432 functionalities and have to add the 433 without interfering with the others. Or when you cant afford slightly wrong. Or when each functionality adds complexity at a higher rate than an engineer and over time the projects gets to an unmanageable size.

We have an instance where the non-tech team has started building tooling for themselves (because the technical team is overburdened with work).

Essentially a small application idea that interfaces with the larger system. It was POC built in 2-3 days, 3 or 4 commits.

Impressive - however the person that built it has now made 400 more commits over the last 3 months to this project as it has been modified, it’s essentially become his part / full time job to just build + maintain this new application.

They have become a software developer. An untrained one, one that doesn’t understand security or best practices. Maybe as Claude gets better the load will be lightened and it will not consume their day, but as it stands - at my company, all of these initial “vibe apps” are becoming maintenance for them, taking up more and more of their time. It’s obvious that they want MORE software, not less. So traditional software engineering is probably gone, but managing expanding platforms and handling security, complexities, documentation, business logic, all of that is still standing in the way for my company.

So you are correct saying that people can build projects with text, but I feel that “set and forget” has never been the case for all but the simplest software. Someone still has to manage all of it, I think. Whether trained in SE or not.

My guess is that developers who have experience can still outperform untrained people, though the builders who are curious by nature will quickly get up to speed. The game is changing but traditional developers have a huge upper hand, because we’ve always wanted to know how things work under the hood. I could have built the current vibe app that they built in a hour using AI, it’s taken them months.

Deploying software has been reduced to just running 'vercel' in the terminal, something the agent has zero problems with if they were to just ask. Distributing desktop software is a bit harder depending on the platform.

The gap between a pet project and great software is still very wide and I have a hard time believing that it will ever be bridged.

I don't see how a solved problem even before ai is the thing that won't be replaced first. I struggle to believe a personal project requires complex infra

AI-assisted coding is great, but vibe coding IMO is only good for disposable prototypes.

You're not going to vibe-code a financial app that needs to be maintained indefinitely.

You're also not going to mess with legacy systems.

I think that AI has definitely replaced _some_ engineers, but I don't think your use case is relevant. Your non-engineering friends have created their pet project because they now can, but it's not as if they were going to hire anyone to do it, right? They haven't up until now.

For most apps, delivery has been some equivalent of “git push heroku main” and setting a DNS record for like 15 years. That’s especially true for most of the apps being vibe coded today.

The fact that “cloud engineer” is still a job suggests that the simple case is not the one driving employment. There are definitely more devops/sre/cloud engineer roles today than there were in 2009 (and I’d be willing to wager you if you included pre-devops sysadmins in that count, there’d still be more total roles today).

The thought experiment I like to have is imagining my company running without engineers and just LLMs. The thought of my CEO or sales guys sitting down and reading/redirecting LLMs all day is just hilarious. My CEO is highly technical but he has other shit to do. The first thing they'd do is hire someone to do that for them, and the best person for that task is someone who knows how things _should_ be.

Now they'll probably get someone on discount, because our salaries are going to tank due to evaporating demand, but I sincerely doubt it'll be zero-d demand.

What I expect is a 3D printer moment - tons and tons of homebrew / shareware style software coming out, an explosion of boutique code.

I also expect a CNC machine moment - vastly reduced demand for hands-on specialists, and more babysitting of automted processes. But it's those machinists who got those jobs.

We could be looking at a long term suppression (~80% reduction?) in demand though until economic growth produces enough demand to employ ~50M software engineers again, if ever. The cliff is unlikely, I'd guess the unregretted loss will be replaced by AI productivity every year, and some portion of growth will, too.

I also guess that all the AI companies can become massively successful without causing much unemployment just by following Claude's model - charge a certain tangible % of a salary for assisting the worker. https://jodavaho.io/posts/ai-jobpocolypse.html

Yeah, it won't. SWE here with a sidegoal to tackle the deployment side through various means (homelabbing, grabbing sre/cloud/observability tasks at work).

The biggest observable improvement in my post and pre ai development is the ability to tackle two projects at once, if the agent is on track. If not, and I have to do a deep dive to debug, it basically regresses to plain old everything like before.

LLMs can now quite trivially write Terraform or Ansible code to setup infra, maybe harder for non-engineers to make those prompts for now. But ongoing maintenance and monitoring would require an online agent evaluating signals and deciding when to take what action or prompt the user. Like autoscaling decesions can be already automated and some failover/recovery for simple cases. Probably people releasing hobby projects do not need too much. And then there are things like exe.dev to wrap that and make it simply to give an execution env instead of you and your agent managing your own infra.

"has already replaced several software engineers. "

I think this is incorrect, unless your friends employed software engineers, or would have employed software engineers.

That's an interesting point of view, because one of my most successful uses of AI is automating all of the DevOps drudgery that I need to do but just couldn't find the time to dedicate writing (and maintining) tools to automate more of it.

What you're describing is an effect that has always existed. It became clear to me a few decades ago earlier in my career that if a dev's only real skill was "write code" that they were severely limited compared to people who had strong domain knowledge *and* had "write code".

The tech boom has made people forget this, but that fact never changed. And now what we're seeing is that the "write code" part is increasingly becoming devalued. What does this mean? That those with domain knowledge will still be able to function, whereas people who could only write code will be devalued.

> who have now been able to create their pet projects

> So in my anecdotal case, AI has already replaced several software engineers.

Those projects wouldn't exist without language models to begin with. That means in your anecdotal case AI hasn't replaced any SEs.

I wouldn't say software engineers have been replaced. Rather, those software projects would never have gotten created in the first place.

Same way 3D printing replaced all common goods, can be done by anyone. Why not just print it yourself?

If it's good enough to replace plain Software Engineers it's good enough to do DevOps/SRE too. There's no meaningful distinction between those categories in this context.

> It most certainly will replace software engineers.

I would say it will most certainly replace software developers. There is a subtle difference between these terms.

> It most certainly will replace software engineers. What's missing is, as the article suggests, the "Delivery" bit. But that's not the realm of software engineers, that's the realm of DevOps/SRE/Cloud engineers.

I don't know about that. If a non-engineer is able to replicate your "serious" project from scratch as a "pet project" then perhaps it is not serious in the first place?

> So what they are missing is a platform to easily deploy and maintain their projects, much like a "normal" developer would.Right now it's quite tedious to set up this scaffolding, but it's absolutely possible with AGENTS.md, skills and rigid hollistic tests. Once done, non-technical people can continue developing independently without hiring any software engineers by simply telling claude/codex what they want.

You should already know that maintenance is never free. The big question is are they making money out of it to justify that maintenance?

Maybe it has replaced people that build useless pet projects that make no money, especially internal tools such as dashboards. But again once an incident arrives is when you need someone to untangle that vibe coded mess as it grows in complexity.

There's no lack of such platforms for more than 5 years, they all have free offers and software engineers still have jobs.

A “cloud engineer” is orders of magnitude easier to replace than a programmer - there are entire SaaS products that have been trying to be a drop-in replacement for your career since AWS was out of the gate.

The fact that you still have a job should clue you in that this isn’t going where you think it is, regardless of the state of your friends’ pet projects.

Ruby on Rails generators could build toy projects in like 3 clicks 15 years ago, a Twitter clone being the famous one.

Software engineers still continued to exist somehow.

In your example, those projects were not the domain of engineering. Your friends couldn't afford expertise and those projects never would have been made before. Therefore, these are net-new projects that replace nothing that came before.

This is common in technology, especially software, that improvements in efficiency make software cheaper and expands the total pool of possible software.

And, even if one of the "one button shipping" platforms (and there are many) was hooked into the agent, your friends will hit major problems that they and their AI cannot solve. Whether its tech-debt hell, a major security breach, or something else, any sufficiently complex project will require expertise. Will be a fun day when a European regulator asks a friend about their GDPR compliance and their agent is like "shrug"

Why is scaffolding a PaaS project beyond the current capabilities? Do LLMs not know about the PaaS offerings of GCP/Azure/AWS, Heroku etc? That stuff has been IaC for quite some time now

> So what they are missing is a platform to easily deploy and maintain their projects, ... Right now it's quite tedious to set up this scaffolding...Once scaffolding like this is productized

You kind of sound like you're pretending PaaS doesn't exist. Have I misunderstood?

> You don't really need to work for a company anymore, because a solo dev can absolutely build crazy things

Don't conflate what is theoretically vs. realistically possible. In the real world, successful companies have moats from data, patents/IP, network effects, and so forth. Just because you can develop something in 1/100th the time doesn't make it instantly feasible to build a new business around. Look around the tech industry today.. plenty of companies that could be disrupted by spry AI-powered buidlers, but they are not (owing to these lock-in effects).

> Now everybody has superpowers.

I think that it's very odd how AI enthusiasts misinterpret the situation. If it turns out to be good enough to produce greenfield projects with agentic coding, then it will not only affect developers, but also whole companies and whole business sectors.

The whole dev agency business model is only there because less technical companies don't know how to deal with software, others are just opportunistic to outsource the initial, headcount heavy work. But now the tech is already at the fingertips of an agencies customer, it is only a matter of time those CEO and managers start vibe coding and realize the "only" need one dev that has glimpse of tech skill.

This could also extend to many SaaS businesses. I still see a lot of small businesses that ask for custom software to get rid of manual work. Serious software devs were always too expensive for them. So they either have crappy code from someones nephew or a SaaS that barely works. Now they can create their custom solutions, probably still quite crappy, but they can get more out of it.

What big tech does is kind of whatever, they are readjusting for recession. I am a bit concerned about the disruption in the small to mid sized tech sectors.

I agree with a lot that you say and notice similar trends in our work. I am a little skeptical about this one though:

"You don't really need to work for a company anymore, because a solo dev can absolutely build crazy things, so it's not like you need to rely on anyone else."

One of the reasons for devs to work in company is not that they can't deliver the work themselves. It's that they don't have the connections to land customers. Most devs need a company at least to handle the marketing so they can focus on what they are good at.

You've never actually read anything Ed Zitron wrote, have you?

I'm sorry, but this is borderline silly. Fable has been out for less than a week and you're already making grand pronouncements about its superiority? How much first-hand evidence could you possibly have for that claim?

They seem to address that: "This is sharply different from occupations such as agriculture in which labor demand was famously decimated due to mechanization and automation. The difference is that the amount of calories people consume is relatively fixed — even a 25% increase led to the obesity epidemic — whereas the amount of software produced has grown a millionfold."

Farm employment itself has decreased 4x compared to 1950 (the % figure overstates it since the total workforce is larger). However if we consider the broader "food" industry employment has increased substantially.

Thus we may see "coder" employment decrease but the broader "software/tech" industry increase in employment.

Look up the logging industry. Like 95% of those jobs are automated now, but they like to blame an owl

yep. selective usage of stats at their best. how about factories too? conveyer belts? people losing their jobs all the time whenever automation comes in. and we just "hope" for the best they can find jobs or delusional hopefulness swinging into extremes ("be generalist!", "be specialist!", "work in service!", "learn to code!", "learn to mine coal!"), all incoherent. just listen to @pmarca to see how totally lost and incoherent tech leadership is.

check Stripe Press latest on indutrial automation: https://press.stripe.com/origins-of-efficiency

Dang. I bet the morale of the peers still working there is poor.

My team got a new boss 18mo ago. He had obvious favoritism, and his favorite person happened to be the only person who wasn't a team player. He also over the course of the 18mo, figured out a way to fire every remote worker, no matter how good their past performance was (one even has won several awards above our bosses level; our boss always gives recognition only to that one toxic person). So no replacements via AI, but folks have been feeling really unvalued, much how I would expect an AI replacement to be. Everyone in my supervisor's team, including my supervisor (who is high functioning autistic, and frequently made fun of by our boss), have been applying for jobs elsewhere. I hope for their mental health that they are successful. I did bring up problems with HR a couple times, and even found in the work policies rules that were being violated by him, and that's when I've learned that, at least here, they are just words, and I needed to get out because I was painting a target on my back. Several others also raised concerns, and most of them are the same ones who have since found work elsewhere.

In other news, I've got a job lined up that I will be going to very soon, and I'm excited for that!

damn. hope you guys are ok. what was aftermath? did she get a new job? is it in still in software?

Having to throw away code isn't the primary cost of building the wrong thing. The impact of the software misbehaving, and the need to maintain backwards compatibility are much worse.

>humans in general reasoning

If this happens then LLMs will fix every human problems. It will have cured cancers, solved the pollution and global warming problem, solved wars, and it no one will ever have to work again.

Who cares if anyone has a job in that world?

> alternative was a human building those

... or them not existing at all?

Can you point to any "great" projects on Lovable that would actually be useful as full blown SaaS software tools? Stuff that has been written/prompted by non software experts?

demotivation would be if you lose your job, have dependants, and there is no food on the table. unless big-daddy government payouts or going living in forest, you literally would not be able to get food to eat or roof over your head. that's quite a demotivation from programming!

programming, React, whatver, will be the least of your concern.

Forget weekend projects, people are using AI for talking to each other via IM! It is infuriating!

The layoffs I’ve seen are those where the CEO claims it’s because of AI.

If the bunch of graphics cards becomes truly more efficient, business owners who want to hire humans will not be able to compete.

Wholeheartedly agree, there are some aspects to SWE that could be considered hard, but most of the time it’s rote pattern matching or simple logic resolutions.

People were getting 6-figure salaries with 3 month boot camps before AI, any random college major could eventually become a developer with a few online courses and practicing LeetCode, the party was bound to end eventually.

Even in the case that a college degree was absolutely necessary (it wasn’t) making $150k fresh out of a bachelor’s degree was absurd for every other domain, many of which were much harder than CS.

two cases for you for "no fall-guy":

A) diffuse responsibility. nobody is responsible. — this is what typical beruactacyl operates in.

B) everybody is self-responsible. end users use AI, they are responsible. this is typical MIT licenses. "use at own risk", literally first statement in any open source.

there are systems that can very well operate without "fall-guy".

Engineering should be exactly as rigorous as the task requires. Anything more is wasteful.

Judging by all the trivial errors made in pre-AI code, many of us are far from rigorous a lot of the time.

It’s like that story about the programmer who wants to send the car down the slope one more time to see if it does the same thing again (or whatever it was). The ephemerality makes iteration possible and appropriate, but also makes rigour less important.

>It’s not really about replacing software engineers. But about commodifying it.

AI's having the opposite effect; it multiplies the productiveness of skilled software engineers while simultaneously multiplying the destructiveness of bad ones. The engineer who can shepherd a handful or Claude/Codex instances around simultaneously without producing slop will be immensely better compensated then the engineer who just gives vague instructions to the AI, goes to get a coffee and hopes for the best.

> Why would anyone think the same thing won't apply here?

Because there's nothing to "move up into" other than "spec, optionally design".

Because the jobs that had "spec, design but don't code" already existed for decades, and pay less than half what the "design + code" person earned.

Agree, AIs are better decision-makers on average than people (just look at the grifters we've given power to). These are machines that can perform more advanced mathematics than even the most advanced mathematicians.

> orgs of today still trust people and hold people to account >Neither of these are strong moats

Having accountable people in key positions is a very important part of running a successful organization. Anthropic and OpenAI are never going to let you sue them when an AI employee makes a mistake; accountability is a strong moat.

I guess by "actual AI" you mean what most people call "AGI"

> You can't fire Claude if it fucks up

What's the difference between "firing" Claude vs moving to a model from a different provider? The latter seems very analogous to firing an employee for performance and backfilling with someone new.

Re the rest, it's just not my experience that models become incapable of making good decisions in cases where input token count > the context window, but ymmv based on domain.

A very extreme example of this: a couple years ago when GPT 4 was state of the art and the 32K context variant was gated to design partners I worked at an EdTech company in the college admissions space that wanted to produce quarterly reports on student progress for parents. That involved crunching a LOT of data (multiple hours of meeting transcripts per week, very detailed notes about student activities, their general profile - UK and US admissions function very differently!)

It was a difficult problem, but we _did_ manage to produce these reports 4K output tokens at a time at a level of quality that exceeded what humans could do internally, and models+the surrounding tooling have only gotten better since then.

I find that it depends a lot on the project.

I'm doing solo mobile app projects, and I have no need to iterate on specs. The bottleneck is QA testing whether it works on the phone.

I don't need to carefully review and understand the implementation. It's not important whether I understand the details of how exactly UICollectionView in Apple's UIKit works.

I see that my implementation works on different physical devices, my tests cover device rotation, and I checked the memory allocations in the Instruments tool.

It has been some months of part-time work on my side, and I will publish this iOS app soon.

Without AI I could not have done it, the scope of the features is too large. The project is around 100k LOC.

It is not true that projects become unmaintainable and abandoned because of agentic engineering, or even vibecoding if you want to call it that.

LLMs still do not have proper contextual understanding of their solutions. Just couple days ago I was using GPT 5.5 with xhigh to vide code some application, and yet it defaulted for sorting dates from new to old by using plain string comparison. Just one of the many bugs.

it sometimes goes like this: vibecoding viberequirements, vibeleadership vibemanagement, vibecustomers

as a matter of taste, you can substitute "slop" as a prefix

I've never seen a greater disconnect between what I read on social media about vibe coding and what I've seen in real life.

In particular the whole "the best people are the ones who will use it the best". IME the best ones are the ones keeping it the most at arm's length while the people who embrace it the most churn out epic amounts of utter slop.

Even AI can do incredible things, like code (our job), It's difficult to me to think that one day, companies will fully assign all software lifecyble job (from designing, implementation, deployement, scaling and maintenance) to autonomous ai agent because, even the better software in the world can have bug and bug can cause from low to fatal real world damage. Those damage , in civil human real world, need a responsible. Unless, govs start voting to give citizenship to ai & autonomous agents and penal responsibility to those agents, human will also be in the loop, always. Because, Human like to designate a responsible and that's right things. So, the adaptative software engineer will always has it place.