Agents are eating the software development lifecycle from the bottom up — code generation already gone, review and ops following fast. What remains is figuring out what people actually want, which can't be automated or scaled. That job is called product engineering, it pays $240k, and nobody's training for it.
I think the author gestures at a pretty solid argument that most of the “mechanical” arguments for LLM capabilities have a clear trend line towards “can do thing”.
Strictly speaking, the job he’s describing even falls into that category, there’s just not a lot of training data for it.
Anecdotally this has matched what I’ve seen. Which is unfortunate because the part of tech I like the least, regarding software development, is when the thing that was built was actually used for anything.
I got into this specifically, and exclusively, for the craft. I don’t like making other’s lives " better", I don’t like “solving problems”, I don’t like the customer. But here we are staring down the barrel of a career making “products”.
I think the author gestures at a pretty solid argument that most of the “mechanical” arguments for LLM capabilities have a clear trend line towards “can do thing”.
Strictly speaking, the job he’s describing even falls into that category, there’s just not a lot of training data for it.
Anecdotally this has matched what I’ve seen. Which is unfortunate because the part of tech I like the least, regarding software development, is when the thing that was built was actually used for anything.
I got into this specifically, and exclusively, for the craft. I don’t like making other’s lives " better", I don’t like “solving problems”, I don’t like the customer. But here we are staring down the barrel of a career making “products”.