sdevonoes

But “product” people can’t really build real production software even with claude. Prototypes, sure. Engineers can (and many do already) deal with product topics. It’s easier for engineers to become more produc oriented than for PM to be able to handle tech topics with AI

The real question for executives is: engineer + AI or PM + AI?

I certainly believe that decent engineers do already have a good degree of knowledge about product topics (it’s like a must nowadays). PM/POs don’t really know enough on the tech side, so they would be clueless even with claude.

Is your company making 5x more? Are your customers 5x happier? Are you getting paid 5x more?

What’s the point of doing 5x more?

Features don’t usually come from product teams. They come from above: some Head Of, VP Of, and the like. Those people only ask, they know very little about execution. They want their wishes come true in a timely manner

Would love to see wifi support

In my circle engineers are more anti-proprietary-ai (openai/anthropic). Open weights are fine.

Why don’t we care being at the mercy (again) of 2-3 companies?

Yeah but the sun would set later in the evening. That’s a nice tradeoff

But multi-billion tech companies that feed your FOSS contributions to their models do fit in that “predatory hegemony that punishes humanity even more” narrative

I guess it depends on how your cv/experience looks like?

I don’t have problems getting interviews (so I guess my cv/experience is relevant to the job… at least I do tailor my cv for each application). I do have problems in some stages of the tech interview (but that’s another story)

As a software engineer in western Europe: I still see plenty of (100%) remote roles available. When I say plenty I mean that there’s enough for me to pick up one and try my luck.

But also I usually work for companies that have a branch in the country I live in

Not true. Things are harder than precovid era but it’s still relatively fine to get a job as software engineer (perhaps except for juniors, but that’s worldwide)

Is it just me or others also feel like “no respect” for this kind of knowledge? Before I was proud to know about TCP connection protocols, 2FC, parsers, compilers… and much of that knowledge had applications on the software I had to build.

But nowadays I have very little interest in knowing how “to prompt better” or why after around 100K tokens of context things start to suck for agents, or compiling tons of MD as “skills”. I don’t find that stuff challenging or interesting (granted, I don’t mean that I know all about it) and I have the feeling that it’s not like learning about operating systems or relational dbs.

I think part of my overall rejection to LLMs comes from this (of course the actual knowledge of how LLMs work under the hood is super interesting, but not their usage Id say)

Problem is that before I wasn’t paying for tools like postgres, git or linux. I donate, and I know that money goes to good hands.

Now I must pay for codex/claude, and that money goes to billionaires psychopaths. So that sucks as you can imagine

Just don’t. Decouple

How would people update wikipedia if there’s no website? Via an app? Don’t think so

> Add some polishing iterations and you have compressed a full product/engineering/QA cycle into one person and thirty minutes.

Depends, I guess. Engineers don’t typically know 100% the business rules (think fintech, payroll, etc.). You typically need to align with domain experts (and no, these people don’t write down their knowledge in confluence pages).

So, unless we are talking about simple software (things that can be broken without too much accountability) then sure

I don’t think dynamic languages like python/ruby/php (I know there have been improvements regarding type checking, still) should be used anymore in the face of ai-generated code. The advantages of these kind of languages are not as relevant as before

It happened once… could happen again

Product doesn’t care. And most of us will get replaced by agents. I guess around 30% of the engineering workforce will keep their jobs which will be mainly to keep the product up and running, doing whatever it takes (so using agents to fix stuff basically).

The ones who get to keep their jobs will be rebranded as Maintenance engineers with a lower salary. VPs and Heads of will keep their cozy job (bc there are not so many of them), and they are not that dumb to fire themselves.

Code understanding doesn’t matter anymore (or won’t matter soon)

First piece of advice, for free: it’s not about beating each other.

Why would a senior with meaningful years of experience would like to do junior tasks? Most companies out there have a good mix of challenging and chore tasks. Seniors are best used in challenging tasks. Juniors help seniors in chores (and learn how challenging tasks are done as well)

> A senior with Max plan beats three junior hires (very rough estimate).

If you have seniors doing the job of juniors, you will soon have no seniors either. If you have a senior doing the job of 3 juniors (which is different than doing 3x kind of tasks), then your senior will burn out and leave as well.

Also, as senior I enjoy working with juniors because I like to teach and share (with seniors that’s also possible but happens way less often). Working in a team of full senior+ engineers is not fun (in regular companies I mean): too much ego, politics, bias… no open to change

It’s the same at work. You don’t ask your colleagues for help anymore, you ask the agent. You can clone all the necessary repos, link to confluence/figma/drive and then ask.

It sucks. I don’t care about being efficient (that’s something the executives care about). I care about how I live my life, and at work that means learning from others (and offer the little knowledge I have to others)… if it takes 2 engineers 2h to solve a bug (vs 20 min for 1 engineer and an agent) then thats great for me. I get the chance to exercise my brain, solve a bug, learn from other engineer and have a bond with that individual. If I solve the bug in 20min with an agent, well, that’s something my boss would love, but I personally would have gained nothing… and would have to jump to solve more bugs alone in the remaining 100 minutes (which feels like running a marathon)

Umm, I think the ones displaced will be product owners tbh. Think about it: with AI we need people that know a bit about everything. A bit about the product itself, the users, the tech, the platform, etc. AI fills in the details, but it’s important to not have many unknown unknowns. So, it’s easier for engineers to learn more about the product (good engineers already know quite some about the products they support) than for product owners to learn more about the tech.

One good engineer plus AI > one good product owner plus AI. The former can build, the latter can’t (unless we are talking about very simple toy products or prototypes)

> The cost of creating software might go down to zero with AI

Keep hearing this, but I think people focus too much on only the first part of software engineering: the producing part. But one also needs to make sure that produced software works as intended… and here engineers (as of October 2026) are as much as needed as pre AI times, if not more (one could argue that more skilled engineers are needed to review the work of decent LLMs spitting decent software but with subtle bugs)

This is not capitalism, it’s tech feudalism

It’s a shame I cannot inspect the tool. It’s a shame I cannot modify it as I see fit. It’s a shame that I need to pay $200/month to use it. But hey, I am a 3X engineer and my boss likes it, so I guess it should be fine? Not really, but I still get to pay the bills (for now)

I miss the tools I used in the past (gcc, linux, sqlite,…)

On AI and communication with others: before AI when joining a company, the first weeks was all about talking to team mates asking about the systems we own as a team, how things work, how to do X, how to get unstuck…

Nowadays you ask all of that to codex/claude. And it works. It’s a regression. I don’t mind spending 2h helping a colleague debugging an issue. It’s fun, it creates bonds and we both benefit from it (ofc my employer would think it’s a waste of time, but I couldn’t care less about what executive millionaires think)

That it will make a few individuals even more ultra mega rich. And then they will have even more power to adjust the world as they see fit.

> Today, software can be created more or less instantly with AI, for a large user base or for yourself, for any purpose or for no serious purpose at all.

I don’t think this is true. I’m working on medium to large features in companies that have around 1K engineers. These features typically involve 50% of work within your domain plus 50% of work in dependant domains. You cannot get anything doing without previous alignment with such domains. There are discussions, tradeoffs, design docs, approval committees, etc. AI can (and does) help in every step, but it’s not a magic wand that can solve the whole thing with a well crafted prompt. Ithe hands of inexperienced people, AI slows down things (e.g., ai-generated robotic and lengthy slack messages that go nowhere, PRs that implement what a jira ticket says… but jira tickets without alignment are worthless, etc)