Why is this not trending on Twitter
21 karma · joined July 13, 2020
Only a small number of people will get the chance to work at that level as the field changes. I think there will be a radical shift from here.
Altman and Dario know this well. That is probably why the tone has changed from “engineering will disappear” to “engineering will change.” But I think we have already reached the inflection point where a large part of the work is getting automated.
Craftsmanship has already started moving somewhere else. Where exactly it moves depends on the kind of work, and I do not think everyone will figure out what the new end goal is.
But define “proficient” here. What does that really mean in this context? A junior engineer, sure, you can tell they’re fucked for now, but for how long does that matter if the models keep getting better?
I worked day and night for long periods to improve that skill. I put in extra hours because getting better was hard, and there was joy and meaning in finally being able to do things that I could not do before.
Now it feels different. A lot of that work can be done with a few prompts and a short feedback loop, and someone who never spent those years learning can often reach a similar result. That is the part I am struggling with. It feels like years of hard-earned advantage disappeared very quickly.
On point 2, yes, again, there is a bit of friction. I would divide this into two cases based on what I have seen. Let’s say you don’t know coding and you are building a product for a decent number of users. Most people who don’t know coding get things wrong. I have seen that. But I have also observed that if they had asked better questions, much better questions, they would have gotten most things right.
The other case is when you are dealing with a large enterprise. That is a different game altogether, but not everyone faces that kind of problem.
Point 3 is completely solved. Most companies have integrated agents into the development cycle itself. If something goes wrong, you review it and merge it. The only bottleneck is when it is connected to external factors.
Point 4: an environment with proper `SKILLS.md` and `AGENTS.md` files writes better code than most senior engineers . Trust me, I am not even lying here.
For problems with a closed feedback loop, I don’t think you need to spend nearly as much time learning every implementation detail. A person who never invested that time can often produce the same result with the right tools. That’s the part I’m struggling with.