by nunez | 2025-08-07 15:31:33+00:00
Great article.

About this:

> So with all these tools built for developers, I realized that the people who gain the most from all these tools are not the developers—it’s all the people around who don’t write code. It’s easier for customers to show what they really want, we can enter sales meetings with a PoC which makes the selling part easier, and product owners can generate a PoC to show the developers how they think and get quicker feedback.

This is, by far, the most harrowing outcome for software engineers from the proliferation of LLMs.

The code they generate is good enough (on first glance) to _finally_ convince non-technical people that they can finally ship software without those pesky software developers.

This was central to Eric Schmidt's speech to Stanford business school students last year [^0]:

> You understand how powerful that is.

> If you can go from arbitrary language to arbitrary digital command, which is essentially what Python in this scenario is, imagine that each and every human on the planet has their own programmer that actually does what they want as opposed to the programmers that work for me who don't do what I ask, right?

> The programmers here know what I'm talking about.

> So imagine a non-arrogant programmer that actually does what you want and you don't have to pay all that money to and there's infinite supply of these programs.

> That's all within the next year or two.

Non-technical business people hold the corporate wallet almost everywhere, even in SV.

Many of them terminally consider software engineering as a means to an end, despite our best efforts to convince them otherwise.

I'm not in that social stratus, but if I had to guess: they know that LLM-generated code can be buggy and introduce loads of slop, but they also know that it takes `<n` developers to maintain all of that versus the `n` developers it takes to generate _and_ maintain software today.

While I'm at it, many of them are extremely excited about offshoring that maintainenance even more aggressively or, in this administration, leveraging H1-B (or other visa'ed) labor to do so (or perhaps not, as I'll explain in a bit).

To those people, the ideal end result of all of this is a small group of architects/10x developers that are reviewing and essentially project managing a literal army of contractors and offshore labor that is pumping out LLM-generated products faster than ever and a slightly larger, but still small, group of SRE-like senior engineers administrating it all in a not-too-dissimilar way.

Since this is going to obviously be more-or-less career-ending hundreds of thousands of people in the medium term, this will, in their (hypothetical) minds, spurn a gig economy of replaceable developers maintaining LLM-produced code. No need to compete for H1-Bs when you have disposable labor right at home.

Actually, it's worse than that. From the article:

> For everything I don’t like doing, AI is phenomenally good. Take design, for instance. I’ve used Lovable and Figma to generate beautiful UIs and then copied the HTML to implement in an Elixir dashboard, and the results have been stunning. I also use AI when I write articles to help with spelling and maintaining a clear narrative thread. It’s rare, but sometimes you get lucky and the AI handles a simple task for you perfectly.

This will apply to _almost everyone_ that is not serving a core "front-of-house" business function, not just engineering. Designers, technical writers and content marketers are already getting pummeled by LLM and stable diffusion, and that's unlikely to reverse now that these are getting even better at those tasks.

I hope I'm dead wrong about all of this and that the future of AI in software is just for supercharging developers.

Nonetheless, all of this has been making me really sad, tbh. I'm a sales engineer, so we're, fortunately, much less affected by all of this as long as sales remains a people-first career. However, I love writing software by hand ("artisanally", as it's now, depressingly, labelled). It's what made me fall in love with my career, and it's now being reduced to worthlessness by our own hand. Thanks to Big AI, whenever I open vim to write some code, I'm now forced to think "should I just hand this over to Claude Code?"

[^0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41263143