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.
This is a really great point. AI tokens are expensive for quality today, and that will continue. We’re already seeing a bit of a plateau, and this whole “let’s slow down so we don’t kill ourselves” is propaganda, I think. AI companies that leverage “price to value” are going to succeed. I see Google Gemini fitting this mold long term, GLM, Kimi did fit this mold but their later models seem to jump in price pretty fast chasing Opus capability. If you take “capable models” as the standard for price to value and then charge what it actually costs (not VC subsidized), then you’re going to see a world where Software Engineers are probably back in high demand. I think the article points out the hard part: how do you grow new Sr. Engineers if you’re replacing Jr’s with Claude. (I think the obvious answer is that we shouldn’t be replacing Jr’s with Claude)
This is a really great point. AI tokens are expensive for quality today, and that will continue. We’re already seeing a bit of a plateau, and this whole “let’s slow down so we don’t kill ourselves” is propaganda, I think. AI companies that leverage “price to value” are going to succeed. I see Google Gemini fitting this mold long term, GLM, Kimi did fit this mold but their later models seem to jump in price pretty fast chasing Opus capability. If you take “capable models” as the standard for price to value and then charge what it actually costs (not VC subsidized), then you’re going to see a world where Software Engineers are probably back in high demand. I think the article points out the hard part: how do you grow new Sr. Engineers if you’re replacing Jr’s with Claude. (I think the obvious answer is that we shouldn’t be replacing Jr’s with Claude)