TrumpetX

Not listing the specific game release, more the game epoch:

• Civilization
• World of Warcraft
• StarCraft
• Sim City
• Quake

You world be very surprised. It’s not what I directly work on, but there are entire programs dedicated to tracking and lowering the cost of password and account resets (and doing it securely). That last part is the hard thing. Large organizations can save millions of dollars if they can get people to not lose/forget their credentials -or- self service those resets (but even then, having that person do it is now losing their time and energy).

It’s not just indirect opportunity costs either, it’s direct costs to the IT organization. Smaller teams can absorb this stuff as a rounding error on their time, but the second you’re counting in the thousands, you need to deal with this type of thing. (And I’ll repeat: securely)

Now imagine doing it as a B2C+B2B organization like Google or Microsoft. The costs are staggering.

Not the commenter, but they’re not taking about CPU costs.

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)

I think saying “we are all product engineers” is not accurate, but this aligns with stuff I’ve been telling my teams for a while. Everyone needs to start becoming closer to product and moving away from programming as the thing they’re valued for. (e.g. I’m not valued because I know Java inheritance rules) To be honest, it always should have been this way (it’s how I’ve lived my career), but some organizations have created this weird “product does the thinking, engineering does the programming” dichotomy and it’s in those situations where this argument makes sense. At a small startup where every new hire understands the business problem and works to achieve that goal is not where this argument makes sense.

My first job was “Analyst/Programmer I” - somewhere along the line it turned into “Programmer” and then “Software Engineer” – pushing the role farther into a technical silo and farther away from the product “because the product managers know best and the nerds need to make it happen by next quarter /s”. The success of individuals on the product side are going to be with folks who can shift to leverage AI for technical chops, and vice versa for Engineers shifting to put on their “Product Hat” more often. With any career, there’s going to be a spectrum of what skills fit into the role (e.g. some positions may be more or less technical or more or less business analyst), but I see the shift happening as a way to preserve ones career in an ever changing world. Those that do not adapt will find themselves on the outside looking in and wondering why (or as an alpaca farmer in northern Idaho because they noped out).

I prefer the term “Meat Proxy”, but I get that it’s more of an ad hominem. I use both terms.