5 ms·

An idea that's beginning to solidify for me is that AI tools make software development harder. It's harder because they dramatically raise the bar for what's p

by simonw 5mo ago

An idea that's beginning to solidify for me is that AI tools make software development harder. It's harder because they dramatically raise the bar for what's possible to do. An individual developer can take on significantly more challenging projects now, because the ultimate constraint has always been time and AI can help you get more done in the time available. But the stuff you can get done with that time is a whole lot harder. You have to understand lots more things, and get radically outside your pre-AI comfort zone. It used to be acceptable to spend several days refactoring a codebase, or figuring out how to ship a small feature because it's in a part of the system you hadn't worked in before or involved learning a new library in order to build it. Coding agents mean you can climb those curves a whole lot faster, but you still need to climb them - and the volume of information coming your way is much higher. If you're worried about non-technical vibe coders taking your job, the correct response is to be much better at building software than those vibe coders. That means you need more skill, more ambition, and more experience. It's hard!

skydhash 5mo ago
Not really. The primary stopper was never time or effort. It was need (and wisdom). If a project was important enough, you’d do it. If it’s not, it falls on the wayside. Now with LLM tools, what you got is a slew of projects their creators aren’t even interested in. It’s theater.
- tptacek 5mo ago
  There's just no way this can be true. Every project I've committed to has been a bet made with incomplete information. Sometimes it pans out, sometimes it doesn't. Every time I've made one of those bets, I've had to shoulder the opportunity cost of 2-3 other 1/8th-finished but promising projects I could have driven to completion instead. Not having that opportunity cost anymore wildly changes the dynamics of what I build. This weekend I'm playing with a SwiftUI MusicKit player (everything I'm doing lately has been Swift/SwiftUI, itself a radical change from just a couple months ago when everything was a TUI, and then a few months back from that and all the way back to 1993, when everything was a CLI) with a Responses API hookup that turns the player into an agent, with tool calls to let the model see what I've been playing. "Keep a continuous queue of music playing while I'm working in the wood shop". Worked a treat. I'm genuinely interested in where I can take this. I have a real problem, one that's been annoying me since ~2000, which is that I "own" a lot of music but find myself stuck in an epicycle of the same 200 songs. Problem solved-ish. I never, ever, in a million years, would have built anything like this before. It's really hard to sell me on the idea that nothing profound has changed here in terms of the projects we now pick up. Go build an operating system. I'm serious! Claude will practically one-shot it. Mine has smoltcp hooked up to a Rust virtio-net driver Claude pulled out of its butt.
  - skydhash 5mo ago
    > This weekend I'm playing with a SwiftUI MusicKit player[…]"Keep a continuous queue of music playing while I'm working in the wood shop" > I have a real problem, one that's been annoying me since ~2000, which is that I "own" a lot of music but find myself stuck in an epicycle of the same 200 songs. What’s the algorithm there? How is it different from queueing up your whole library and shuffling it? > Go build an operating system. I'm serious! Claude will practically one-shot it. Why would I want this? If I wanted to learn how an operating systems is built, there’s xv6 and the OSTEP book (and I’ve already gone through both) And I’ve been going through OpenBSD code, for a few questions that I had (usb audio and related code, usb mass storage and related code,…). Why would I ever wanted a generated project when there’s plenty out there to learn from.
dominotw 5mo ago
developers now are expected to randomly jump around projects and ship without friction. For employers it means they can move us around like pawns. Lot of companies have not reorged themselves to this new type of workforce thats much more malleable. it used to be that i pay your due at some enterpise and learn some corner of codebase really well and become go to person. that would give you job security.
- chasd00 5mo ago
  Working in silos like this has always been an anti pattern though. You end up being employed for 10 years but only have 1 year of actual development experience. Just turning-the-crank and going home was always risky because one day you get laid off and realize you’re 10 years behind the competition.
  - JambalayaJimbo 5mo ago
    What I found comfort it in was turning the crank and then using extra time to upskill in various other things (including non software dev domains). Things that weren’t immediately useful to my employer and I never would have been directly assigned, but did pay off after sometime. Now I’m basically expected to do what my boss wants me to do every minute of the day, it’s gotten much more micromanaged.
  - Terr_ 5mo ago
    I cynically predict that some of the new practices being hyped could easily end up worse... Before: "I learned very little this year, because I was placed in charge of the same stuff, and I've already learned most of what I could from tinkering with that code, stepping through its architecture, and dealing with those recurring problems." Soon: "I learned very little this year, because I don't deeply interact with anything, I just pull the lever on the babbling slot-machine until I get lucky and things seems to quiet down."
  - wiseowise 5mo ago
    As opposed to what? You seriously think that shipping 10 years, instead of turning-the-crank and going home, will save you from the interviewing gauntlet?
onebluecloud 5mo ago
[flagged]
dogcomplex 5mo ago
That's a roundabout way of saying it makes software development easier. Perhaps even a 180. But yes - once it's that easy you have to step up your ambitions.
- simonw 5mo ago
  Maybe it makes software development easier, but a career as a professional software engineer harder.
  - teaearlgraycold 5mo ago
    I hope that after a short period of delusional expectations and layoffs from employers we're at least left with a more consistently competent set of professionals in our industry. Some people have imposter syndrome. Others are actually just imposters.
    - jrflowers 5mo ago
      >layoffs from employers we're at least left with a more consistently competent set of professionals in our industry It definitely won’t be CEOs and managers not firing their buddies
    - locknitpicker 5mo ago
      > Some people have imposter syndrome. Others are actually just imposters. I'm sorry to say, but AI coding assistants paved the way to professional imposters whose only skill is prompting a model to do something. I already had the displeasure of working with a software engineer who not only introduced a bunch of regressions that by mindlessly vibe-coding things against the requirements but also complained that not having credits to use the most expensive frontier models was, and I quote, "stifling my creativity".
      - dogcomplex 5mo ago
        Nonetheless, would still trust Claude to be generally more reliably competent in a random area of software engineering than the average professional. Sure they might still be better in a particular area of their expertise, but we've all had to play the imposter before on the stuff we care less about and figure it out as we go. AIs are still inferior sometimes but usually a decent 7/10+ on most topics - which really fills the gap.
deadbabe 5mo ago
You will never beat the vibe coders. The vibe coders have a key advantage you don’t: they don’t give a fuck. They blow through a task and move onto the next one. Management sees this as progress, and the vibe coders are rewarded. When shit breaks later on down the line, and fires have to be put out and things rewritten, the vibe coders do NOT get the blame. They do NOT get punished. Most engineering teams operate on a blameless culture. If code was approved for production, then it should have been good enough. Vibe coders will keep on doing what they do, and skilled experts will be left cleaning up their messes. For anyone who actually cares, it’s over. You are not steering development anymore.
- derwiki 5mo ago
  Who approved the vibe coders’ PRs?
  - PessimalDecimal 5mo ago
    Other vibe coders?
  - deadbabe 5mo ago
    It’s all just vibe coders high fiving each other and saying LGTM. Here’s a secret: I haven’t really bothered reviewing any PRs since September of last year or so. I just click approve and don’t even read it. It has been way less stressful for me. Do bugs get through? Sure. But someone will just come in and vibe it out anyway. And I have yet to see a vibe coder or anyone who approved their flawed work get any repercussions. So yea, it doesn’t matter. No one’s going to come after you asking “why did you approve this shitty PR?” And if they do you can forward it to the author and ask why they wrote a shitty PR. But that just doesn’t happen. It doesn’t matter.
  - wiseowise 5mo ago
    Another vibe coder and Claude?
- simonw 5mo ago
  That might be true in the short-term, but I'd be very surprised to see that hold for the long-term. We've had plenty of technology trends in the past that have promised faster development but has later turned out to have problems. Organizations that stick around learn lessons about what works and what doesn't. If in a year's time organizations aren't feeling severe downsides from all of the unreviewed vibe-coded junk they put into production then maybe the vibe-coders were right. I'll believe that when I see it.
hibikir 5mo ago
From that perspective, development has always been harder since I started. I left college with a copy of K&R and remembering courses that applied to real life immediately, because data structures and such were just what we had. In my first job, I ended up writing a code generator to help serialize a large number of data structures, straight from a compiler design class.. which right now you don't need to know a thing about, because serialization and languages with introspection are everywhere. The knowledge you need to be a professional engineer just kept going up through the last 30 years, while most of the basics became far less relevant, because the libraries just did it. AI raises the bar again, as its probably at least as good as me, if not better, at anything I learned in college. I've spent years living off of random trivia from the last 30 years, as I saw computing grow with me. How do you know this?! Because everything built on top of it didn't exist when I was your age, so I had to learn it! But well, nowadays the AI is better at that trivia too. The world moves, we do what we can with what we kno. It's not just programming, but what innovation and automation has done to the vast majority of things humans have done to be productive for each other since humans are people. We'll have to cope, like the guy that bred oxes to pull the plows.
- baxtr 5mo ago
  So in essence: it got harder because the easier parts have been solved for?
N_Lens 5mo ago
[flagged]
zarzavat 5mo ago
I worry this is looking at where the ball is now instead of where it's going. The recent disproof of an Erdos conjecture should put to rest the idea that LLMs will reach a skill ceiling before they reach superintelligence. I believe we are headed for a world of superintelligent AI where LLMs are much better at logical thinking than humans, the same way that chess engines are much better at chess than humans. In that world there's really nothing humans can offer in terms of logical thinking other than their humanity itself. An 8 year old with Stockfish can beat Magnus Carlsen, and an 8 year old with Codex (and daddy's credit card) will be able to beat me at software engineering.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- sanderjd 5mo ago
  Are you confident in putting a timeline on this prediction? One of the reasons I'm increasingly skeptical of this prediction is that I've now lived past a few of the dates I heard people put on the achievement of this level of superintelligence in previous years.
- simonw 5mo ago
  I don't buy that at all. It doesn't matter how great the LLMs get, the act of creating software using them will still require a great deal of skill. Most people just don't think in terms of software. Try asking a non-developer in your life what their dream software would be for their work, or their hobby. If they don't have what Nilay Patel calls "software brain" I'd be surprised if they came up with something actionable. (For more on software brain see "THE PEOPLE DO NOT YEARN FOR AUTOMATION", which makes the point I"m making here but much, much better: https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-backlash-databases-automation https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-ba...) You could give a non-developer the smartest LLM in the world and they wouldn't be able to create GitHub with it, because creating GitHub requires an enormous amount of understanding of what software developers need from a cloud source control tool. Sure, you can argue that the LLM "knows" what GitHub needs already and can guide their human-user to that, but why would a human-user who doesn't understand the domain ask an LLM to do that in the first place?
emodendroket 5mo ago
That's true but in a way it's also more fun and engaging because the tedious stuff just gets worked through leaving you to think about the bigger picture items. Though I'll say I don't buy the stuff about AI "democratizing" development since making it much more capital-intensive kind of has the opposite effect for anybody doing dev work at home.
ElProlactin 5mo ago
> If you're worried about non-technical vibe coders taking your job, the correct response is to be much better at building software than those vibe coders. That means you need more skill, more ambition, and more experience. It's hard! This is a false fear. The real risk isn't that some 19 year-old vibe coder is going to replace you, it's that there's simply less need for more experienced engineers. The market is shrinking. Also, even if the premise behind the SaaSpocalypse is naive and oversimplified (companies aren't going to replace all their SaaSes with internally vibe-coded replacements), it looks reasonable that net-net AI will have a negative impact on the value of software.
- batshit_beaver 5mo ago
  > The real risk isn't that some 19 year-old vibe coder is going to replace you, it's that there's simply less need for more experienced engineers. The market is shrinking. That last sentence is verifiably false if you look at SWE job postings and their recovery since 2022. It’s also a poor take in general, buying very much into the narrative propagated primarily by OpenAI and, especially, Anthropic, who nonetheless continue to hire large numbers of SWEs while paying double the market rate.
  - wiseowise 5mo ago
    > That last sentence is verifiably false if you look at SWE job postings and their recovery since 2022. Do you take into account recent layoffs of Meta (8k people), Block (4k people) and others?
  - ElProlactin 5mo ago
    > That last sentence is verifiably false if you look at SWE job postings and their recovery since 2022. Source? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE And it's probably worse than it looks because phantom job postings are a real thing. > ...who nonetheless continue to hire large numbers of SWEs while paying double the market rate. Tech companies have laid off over 200,000 people since the beginning of 2025. Even putting aside the fact that (from what I understand) over half of Anthropic and OpenAI's employees are in non-engineering roles, if you assumed every employee was an engineer, Anthropic and OpenAI could triple their staffing levels and it still wouldn't even fill a quarter of the void.
svara 5mo ago
I had the same thought recently, I've had it happen to myself. I've been working on something relatively large and greenfield recently. A big chunk of my time is spent thinking about the hard parts. The raw information processing rate needed to keep up with the state of the project is high. It feels almost like mental athleticism, whereas coding used to be a rather chill activity.
wiseowise 5mo ago
> If you're worried about non-technical vibe coders taking your job I'm not worried about non-technical vibe coders taking my job. I'm worried about psychotic VCs and CEOs putting me on the street in the name of "optimization" of "lower value human capital".

by simonw 5mo ago

skydhash 5mo ago

Not really. The primary stopper was never time or effort. It was need (and wisdom). If a project was important enough, you’d do it. If it’s not, it falls on the wayside. Now with LLM tools, what you got is a slew of projects their creators aren’t even interested in. It’s theater.

tptacek 5mo ago
There's just no way this can be true. Every project I've committed to has been a bet made with incomplete information. Sometimes it pans out, sometimes it doesn't. Every time I've made one of those bets, I've had to shoulder the opportunity cost of 2-3 other 1/8th-finished but promising projects I could have driven to completion instead. Not having that opportunity cost anymore wildly changes the dynamics of what I build. This weekend I'm playing with a SwiftUI MusicKit player (everything I'm doing lately has been Swift/SwiftUI, itself a radical change from just a couple months ago when everything was a TUI, and then a few months back from that and all the way back to 1993, when everything was a CLI) with a Responses API hookup that turns the player into an agent, with tool calls to let the model see what I've been playing. "Keep a continuous queue of music playing while I'm working in the wood shop". Worked a treat. I'm genuinely interested in where I can take this. I have a real problem, one that's been annoying me since ~2000, which is that I "own" a lot of music but find myself stuck in an epicycle of the same 200 songs. Problem solved-ish. I never, ever, in a million years, would have built anything like this before. It's really hard to sell me on the idea that nothing profound has changed here in terms of the projects we now pick up. Go build an operating system. I'm serious! Claude will practically one-shot it. Mine has smoltcp hooked up to a Rust virtio-net driver Claude pulled out of its butt.
- skydhash 5mo ago
  > This weekend I'm playing with a SwiftUI MusicKit player[…]"Keep a continuous queue of music playing while I'm working in the wood shop" > I have a real problem, one that's been annoying me since ~2000, which is that I "own" a lot of music but find myself stuck in an epicycle of the same 200 songs. What’s the algorithm there? How is it different from queueing up your whole library and shuffling it? > Go build an operating system. I'm serious! Claude will practically one-shot it. Why would I want this? If I wanted to learn how an operating systems is built, there’s xv6 and the OSTEP book (and I’ve already gone through both) And I’ve been going through OpenBSD code, for a few questions that I had (usb audio and related code, usb mass storage and related code,…). Why would I ever wanted a generated project when there’s plenty out there to learn from.

dominotw 5mo ago

developers now are expected to randomly jump around projects and ship without friction. For employers it means they can move us around like pawns. Lot of companies have not reorged themselves to this new type of workforce thats much more malleable. it used to be that i pay your due at some enterpise and learn some corner of codebase really well and become go to person. that would give you job security.

chasd00 5mo ago
Working in silos like this has always been an anti pattern though. You end up being employed for 10 years but only have 1 year of actual development experience. Just turning-the-crank and going home was always risky because one day you get laid off and realize you’re 10 years behind the competition.
- JambalayaJimbo 5mo ago
  What I found comfort it in was turning the crank and then using extra time to upskill in various other things (including non software dev domains). Things that weren’t immediately useful to my employer and I never would have been directly assigned, but did pay off after sometime. Now I’m basically expected to do what my boss wants me to do every minute of the day, it’s gotten much more micromanaged.
- Terr_ 5mo ago
  I cynically predict that some of the new practices being hyped could easily end up worse... Before: "I learned very little this year, because I was placed in charge of the same stuff, and I've already learned most of what I could from tinkering with that code, stepping through its architecture, and dealing with those recurring problems." Soon: "I learned very little this year, because I don't deeply interact with anything, I just pull the lever on the babbling slot-machine until I get lucky and things seems to quiet down."
- wiseowise 5mo ago
  As opposed to what? You seriously think that shipping 10 years, instead of turning-the-crank and going home, will save you from the interviewing gauntlet?

onebluecloud 5mo ago

[flagged]

dogcomplex 5mo ago

That's a roundabout way of saying it makes software development easier. Perhaps even a 180. But yes - once it's that easy you have to step up your ambitions.

simonw 5mo ago
Maybe it makes software development easier, but a career as a professional software engineer harder.
- teaearlgraycold 5mo ago
  I hope that after a short period of delusional expectations and layoffs from employers we're at least left with a more consistently competent set of professionals in our industry. Some people have imposter syndrome. Others are actually just imposters.
  - jrflowers 5mo ago
    >layoffs from employers we're at least left with a more consistently competent set of professionals in our industry It definitely won’t be CEOs and managers not firing their buddies
  - locknitpicker 5mo ago
    > Some people have imposter syndrome. Others are actually just imposters. I'm sorry to say, but AI coding assistants paved the way to professional imposters whose only skill is prompting a model to do something. I already had the displeasure of working with a software engineer who not only introduced a bunch of regressions that by mindlessly vibe-coding things against the requirements but also complained that not having credits to use the most expensive frontier models was, and I quote, "stifling my creativity".
    - dogcomplex 5mo ago
      Nonetheless, would still trust Claude to be generally more reliably competent in a random area of software engineering than the average professional. Sure they might still be better in a particular area of their expertise, but we've all had to play the imposter before on the stuff we care less about and figure it out as we go. AIs are still inferior sometimes but usually a decent 7/10+ on most topics - which really fills the gap.

deadbabe 5mo ago

You will never beat the vibe coders. The vibe coders have a key advantage you don’t: they don’t give a fuck. They blow through a task and move onto the next one. Management sees this as progress, and the vibe coders are rewarded. When shit breaks later on down the line, and fires have to be put out and things rewritten, the vibe coders do NOT get the blame. They do NOT get punished. Most engineering teams operate on a blameless culture. If code was approved for production, then it should have been good enough. Vibe coders will keep on doing what they do, and skilled experts will be left cleaning up their messes. For anyone who actually cares, it’s over. You are not steering development anymore.

derwiki 5mo ago
Who approved the vibe coders’ PRs?
- PessimalDecimal 5mo ago
  Other vibe coders?
- deadbabe 5mo ago
  It’s all just vibe coders high fiving each other and saying LGTM. Here’s a secret: I haven’t really bothered reviewing any PRs since September of last year or so. I just click approve and don’t even read it. It has been way less stressful for me. Do bugs get through? Sure. But someone will just come in and vibe it out anyway. And I have yet to see a vibe coder or anyone who approved their flawed work get any repercussions. So yea, it doesn’t matter. No one’s going to come after you asking “why did you approve this shitty PR?” And if they do you can forward it to the author and ask why they wrote a shitty PR. But that just doesn’t happen. It doesn’t matter.
- wiseowise 5mo ago
  Another vibe coder and Claude?
simonw 5mo ago
That might be true in the short-term, but I'd be very surprised to see that hold for the long-term. We've had plenty of technology trends in the past that have promised faster development but has later turned out to have problems. Organizations that stick around learn lessons about what works and what doesn't. If in a year's time organizations aren't feeling severe downsides from all of the unreviewed vibe-coded junk they put into production then maybe the vibe-coders were right. I'll believe that when I see it.

hibikir 5mo ago

From that perspective, development has always been harder since I started. I left college with a copy of K&R and remembering courses that applied to real life immediately, because data structures and such were just what we had. In my first job, I ended up writing a code generator to help serialize a large number of data structures, straight from a compiler design class.. which right now you don't need to know a thing about, because serialization and languages with introspection are everywhere. The knowledge you need to be a professional engineer just kept going up through the last 30 years, while most of the basics became far less relevant, because the libraries just did it. AI raises the bar again, as its probably at least as good as me, if not better, at anything I learned in college. I've spent years living off of random trivia from the last 30 years, as I saw computing grow with me. How do you know this?! Because everything built on top of it didn't exist when I was your age, so I had to learn it! But well, nowadays the AI is better at that trivia too. The world moves, we do what we can with what we kno. It's not just programming, but what innovation and automation has done to the vast majority of things humans have done to be productive for each other since humans are people. We'll have to cope, like the guy that bred oxes to pull the plows.

baxtr 5mo ago
So in essence: it got harder because the easier parts have been solved for?

N_Lens 5mo ago

[flagged]

zarzavat 5mo ago

I worry this is looking at where the ball is now instead of where it's going. The recent disproof of an Erdos conjecture should put to rest the idea that LLMs will reach a skill ceiling before they reach superintelligence. I believe we are headed for a world of superintelligent AI where LLMs are much better at logical thinking than humans, the same way that chess engines are much better at chess than humans. In that world there's really nothing humans can offer in terms of logical thinking other than their humanity itself. An 8 year old with Stockfish can beat Magnus Carlsen, and an 8 year old with Codex (and daddy's credit card) will be able to beat me at software engineering.

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
sanderjd 5mo ago
Are you confident in putting a timeline on this prediction? One of the reasons I'm increasingly skeptical of this prediction is that I've now lived past a few of the dates I heard people put on the achievement of this level of superintelligence in previous years.
simonw 5mo ago
I don't buy that at all. It doesn't matter how great the LLMs get, the act of creating software using them will still require a great deal of skill. Most people just don't think in terms of software. Try asking a non-developer in your life what their dream software would be for their work, or their hobby. If they don't have what Nilay Patel calls "software brain" I'd be surprised if they came up with something actionable. (For more on software brain see "THE PEOPLE DO NOT YEARN FOR AUTOMATION", which makes the point I"m making here but much, much better: https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-backlash-databases-automation https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-ba...) You could give a non-developer the smartest LLM in the world and they wouldn't be able to create GitHub with it, because creating GitHub requires an enormous amount of understanding of what software developers need from a cloud source control tool. Sure, you can argue that the LLM "knows" what GitHub needs already and can guide their human-user to that, but why would a human-user who doesn't understand the domain ask an LLM to do that in the first place?

emodendroket 5mo ago

That's true but in a way it's also more fun and engaging because the tedious stuff just gets worked through leaving you to think about the bigger picture items. Though I'll say I don't buy the stuff about AI "democratizing" development since making it much more capital-intensive kind of has the opposite effect for anybody doing dev work at home.

ElProlactin 5mo ago

> If you're worried about non-technical vibe coders taking your job, the correct response is to be much better at building software than those vibe coders. That means you need more skill, more ambition, and more experience. It's hard! This is a false fear. The real risk isn't that some 19 year-old vibe coder is going to replace you, it's that there's simply less need for more experienced engineers. The market is shrinking. Also, even if the premise behind the SaaSpocalypse is naive and oversimplified (companies aren't going to replace all their SaaSes with internally vibe-coded replacements), it looks reasonable that net-net AI will have a negative impact on the value of software.

batshit_beaver 5mo ago
> The real risk isn't that some 19 year-old vibe coder is going to replace you, it's that there's simply less need for more experienced engineers. The market is shrinking. That last sentence is verifiably false if you look at SWE job postings and their recovery since 2022. It’s also a poor take in general, buying very much into the narrative propagated primarily by OpenAI and, especially, Anthropic, who nonetheless continue to hire large numbers of SWEs while paying double the market rate.
- wiseowise 5mo ago
  > That last sentence is verifiably false if you look at SWE job postings and their recovery since 2022. Do you take into account recent layoffs of Meta (8k people), Block (4k people) and others?
- ElProlactin 5mo ago
  > That last sentence is verifiably false if you look at SWE job postings and their recovery since 2022. Source? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE And it's probably worse than it looks because phantom job postings are a real thing. > ...who nonetheless continue to hire large numbers of SWEs while paying double the market rate. Tech companies have laid off over 200,000 people since the beginning of 2025. Even putting aside the fact that (from what I understand) over half of Anthropic and OpenAI's employees are in non-engineering roles, if you assumed every employee was an engineer, Anthropic and OpenAI could triple their staffing levels and it still wouldn't even fill a quarter of the void.

svara 5mo ago

I had the same thought recently, I've had it happen to myself. I've been working on something relatively large and greenfield recently. A big chunk of my time is spent thinking about the hard parts. The raw information processing rate needed to keep up with the state of the project is high. It feels almost like mental athleticism, whereas coding used to be a rather chill activity.

wiseowise 5mo ago

> If you're worried about non-technical vibe coders taking your job I'm not worried about non-technical vibe coders taking my job. I'm worried about psychotic VCs and CEOs putting me on the street in the name of "optimization" of "lower value human capital".