at my company they are trying to get us engineers to absorb that role so now we spend a lot of our time doing meetings and human interactions like this with other parts of the business and making decisions

idk how common this is in the industry though, but since the introduction of AI my role has expanded so much beyond what is just writing code, i'm now a devops/product/dev person and expected to do all of that at once for the same pay as before

i actually enjoy it myself cause you feel less like a ticket pusher

“It’s a job that requires lots of human interaction, and this part is notoriously complicated for engineers.”

Don’t worry, human interaction is very complicated. Thankfully there are no llm models/google/xai with technology to do exactly that. Your pearls are safe.

users will get their problems solved directly by engaging with AI without needing software

I had to call Verizon customer support yesterday for something. Their AI customer support agent sounded like a person and worked just fine.

I think you can eventually set up an AI system that handles a lot of the interactions and conversations people have.

You're right that this is going to suck for the engineers who fit the stereotype, didn't like interacting with users, and would express that they just want to stay in the code.

For the rest of us, that's not a problem.

You're missing the point about how the industry is going to go through a great narrowing. In the past, you'd have one PM and 8-12 engineers. Now you only need 2-3 people with both product and engineering ("architecture", to quote the author) skillsets. You are absolutely correct that most engineers are not interested in the Product side - those are the engineers who are going to get cut in this great narrowing. Quoting the author:

> I grew up with the distinction of "tech guy" needs a "product guy". I am not dismissing it, I am just saying that the world is entering into a phase where both roles are eventually melting into a single function.

The whole reason why Engineering exists in organizations is to take Product's ideas and turn them into reality. When Product can realize its own ideas (through AI) then Engineering is no longer necessary as a political sub-organization. Making it happen requires engineers to learn Product skills and adopt a "Product" job title. We will likely call people with both skillsets Product Engineers. People who can't adapt to learning both skillsets are at risk of losing their jobs.

It's not that bad. You're describing what senior devs have always been.

Don't get me wrong. There absolutely is survival bias at play here. Historically speaking, most devs change careers long before they turn senior.

I'm just not understanding the hysteria. This is the latest set of reasons for people to quit. Before AI, it was outsourcing. If you want to, just quit already. If you want to stay, deal with it.

> notoriously complicated for engineers

That is such bs. I’ve known just as many pms incapable of human connection. And scrummasters. And project managers. And every other “needs empathy” job.

Stop spreading this bias nonesense.

What would you say you do here? - https://www.youtube.com/shorts/z4Xw6WMvfNk

Gen AI has changed every single part of classic software development, and the impact hasn't even remotely been felt. And zero jobs are "safe" in that traditional way that we saw them.

It's actually staggering to think of how the teams I've led developed software five years ago, ten years ago, fifteen years ago and twenty years ago. Easily 95% of that effort has been obliterated (I'm estimating on the low side, more like 99.5%). Classic wisdom like "the specification needs to be 100% up front because once we implement it stratifies" are relics of the past.

Everything has changed. I can't fully express how software development will work, but it certainly won't involve someone whose job is "human interaction".

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You seriously manage 50 human PMs? That sounds really interesting, I can't even imagine what kind of role that would be, other than someone running multiple companies simultaneously. Could you share what you do?

As far as I can tell, the reason for the lack of companies is that they've made it impossible to monetize "software for other people" and apparently vast swathes of what used to need management are now "I can just build the parts of that I care about, it doesn't have to be good enough to ship to anyone else." (This horrifies me, though there is a silver lining: the value of the "idea guys" has also gone to zero :-)

Selling shovels is definitely more profitable, less risky and easier than using it to earn money.

> They can obviously push huge volumes of code

Huge volumes of buggy code. The ChatGPT web interface should be an absolute embarrassment. Tap the input box, scrolls to top. Submit input, scrolls to top. 1+ second delay from keypress to input. Scrolling locks up. It’s been an absolute buggy mess for ages, the specific bugs change day to day. I suppose this is what happens when people think the LLMs are good enough to let loose without supervision.

The piece says:

> Code spitters are cooked, let's be honest here and accept the fate so everyone can move on.

I'm guessing "code spitters" here means people who consider their job to be manually writing code based on requirements produced by others.

Personally, I think the role of "developer" has already expanded way beyond that. If you're a technology expert who understands what is and is not possible to build, how it can be built, how to prompt that thing into existence, verify that the implementation is good, then get that implementation safely into production, you're not "cooked" at all.

I think it is: From my personal experience, it's the orgs that fail much more so than the technology. If you have a few capable engineers with AI that are able to think strategically and prod the agents from the right angle, you can move ridiculously fast.

Code quality improves month by month, and by now I rarely have complaints in PR reviews, even if I read through them manually, line by line. For the most part, it's how I would write it myself, only that I would have been slower, and not as motivated to test it so thoroughly.

The key is IMHO giving the agents a way to verify their results in a feedback loop as short as possible, along with few instructions for the important guardrails, and a way to organise efficiently (a ledger, a GitHub repository with issues, Linear, Jira, whatever.) With that, you can tend to 3-5 parallel sessions to avoid waiting, and actually get stuff done fast.

Five years ago pretty much all of this was science fiction. It might not be that grim right now, but what about in another five years?

There's more than one kind of project manager.

The "I just manage the Gantt chart" folks are screwed, I think.

The ones that are good at translating between teams can be a huge force multiplier.

Yes this looks like someone's train of thought feelings about the topic. Not a lot of depth.

Other this PMs do is apply judgement and make trade offs… current generation of LLMs sin’t going to do that

Nobody really knows.

My hunch is that software is pretty much going to end the way we think of it today.

Hardware, too, but that will take longer. If you think big enough, the idea of waiting for a new TV or phone or gaming system when you can just have your agent take your description, spec and order the hardware and have it fabbed for you in days ... is kind of quaint.

The broad societal disruption will be pretty devastating. But looking at software as the microcosm really lets you dream (/nightmare) big.

To me the question is not will we be able to get anything we want how we want it, but more who will have money to buy this?

That's what my last company told themselves. Five different simple client/server applications in its suite, five different architectures with different language/framework/storage choices. At one point, my senior engineer spent 6 months writing his own Java threading library because he thought he was smarter than Java devs.

I was hired as a TPdM. I unabashedly wrestled technology decisions away from them because these "senior" and "principal" engineers obviously showed they could not be trusted.

Exactly because professionals are often artists, who are creative instead of taking the same shot as everyone else. Insta is full of copy cats, same photo different "person". Its boring because of that, seen one seem em all.

The trades also have the difficulty of pricing themselves out of the market, while AI can come in and help normal folks to do all that stuff themselves.

Hopefully all these unpredictable side effects include bringing down the cost of living.

Thank you for saying this. Business strategy will always ruthlessly optimize for efficiency. And this means doing more (or same) with less humans. Anyone not seeing this happening already isn't seeing the news.

60k fired from Microsoft

Today Cisco announcing 1 engineer using AI to try to replace/improve 98% of Cisco's code

Goog just lost $475B in value

These are not random disparate events. This is the industry changing to business as usual with less humans.

Note that people laid off are not able to find jobs for more than 9 months. This is a very serious situation.

You missed a key word on there and that's making decisions - you need to make dozens of decisions a day when faced with new and limited information.

If you rely on AI to make those decisions, at least with today's capabilities, you will quickly see how sub optimal the results are.

so who's looking at the numbers, planning features and pushing for "them"? What are we calling that?