Like codebases or trees, organizations grow unevenly and end up overstaffed in places or under in others. AI is political cover to trim and prune a company to operate more lean without freaking everyone out.
No one is gonna fire ALL the devs. It’ll be a race: each company will have their devs managing more and more agents.
Every agentic coding agent incurs management overhead - yes, it’ll go down, but at the same rate for everyone.
More humans still means more capability.
To say nothing of the hard won knowledge in engineers’ heads; if we can’t get that out in the era of cheap and easy documentation (Notion etc) why would we be able to in the era of AI?
baggachipz · 7h ago
Breathless extrapolations like this one are the reason we're about to have a nasty bubble pop.
1over137 · 7h ago
Written by "Head of AI Systems at Palantir" So I doubt without ulterior motive.
kordlessagain · 7h ago
It's almost halfway through 2025 and AI can generate perfectly fine code from conversational language interactions.
The interactions are where it's at - prompting obviously - but also feedback and clarification after breaking.
I went through the process of trying to figure out what a coding agent that coded for someone who didn't code look like when it first got going and created this: https://github.com/kordless/evolvemcp
It's less than perfect, but works well. I've used it to "auto code" several MCP servers/tools (honestly the MCP language is super confusing) and I can see where an MCP proxy with a search engine attached to it will be super handy later (and if you understand that and build such a thing, you're welcome for the idea if you hadn't had it already).
techpineapple · 7h ago
I see this argument a lot, people are really bad at extrapolating out into the future, but and maybe this is controversial, but I feel like most technologies don’t get _that_ much better as time goes on. I guess it’s like, people assume LLM’s are like the first CPU’s, where they doubled in speed every year, but maybe they’re more like the internet. A little more high fidelity but mostly just used to sell you shit and show you ads.
dr_dshiv · 7h ago
Jan, 2023
suddenlybananas · 7h ago
Doesn't seem to have aged incredibly well.
salmonfamine · 7h ago
Speak for yourself. Copilot took my job and my wife
No one is gonna fire ALL the devs. It’ll be a race: each company will have their devs managing more and more agents.
Every agentic coding agent incurs management overhead - yes, it’ll go down, but at the same rate for everyone.
More humans still means more capability.
To say nothing of the hard won knowledge in engineers’ heads; if we can’t get that out in the era of cheap and easy documentation (Notion etc) why would we be able to in the era of AI?
The interactions are where it's at - prompting obviously - but also feedback and clarification after breaking.
I went through the process of trying to figure out what a coding agent that coded for someone who didn't code look like when it first got going and created this: https://github.com/kordless/evolvemcp
It's less than perfect, but works well. I've used it to "auto code" several MCP servers/tools (honestly the MCP language is super confusing) and I can see where an MCP proxy with a search engine attached to it will be super handy later (and if you understand that and build such a thing, you're welcome for the idea if you hadn't had it already).