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Undistorted, Radical Clarity's avatar

This is one of the most lucid, grounded reflections I’ve read on where we actually are. Not where the hype says we are. Not where the fear says we’re going. But where we are. The shift from writing code to shaping intent isn’t just technical—it’s psychological, cultural, and economic. And many senior devs still haven’t metabolized that. This piece doesn’t panic or preach—it observes. And that’s exactly what’s needed when the ground is moving. Thank you for saying it all out loud.

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Jeff Morhous's avatar

Great stuff! Especially loved the references to some other's posts on the junior developer market and skill value

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Etchot's avatar

Another excellent article! Great job! I am looking forward to reading your next article.

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Juraj Smeriga's avatar

Thank you for the work that you’re doing!

As you were describing the frontier advancement - I’ve been thinking about the next big thing in AI-based SWE, the bottleneck as your vibe-coding project grows in size is currently QA. I’ve been wondering why hasn’t Manus or Runner H focused more on pushing/marketing this use case, going through the UI based on user stories could be really powerful to identify complex integration-level issues.

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Charlie Guo's avatar

I think the big challenge is reliability, browser use agents as a whole are struggling with reliability benchmarks. i’m guessing eventually we’ll get a model fine tuned on doing QA type tasks but probably once we’ve saturated more of the coding aspect.

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Benjamin's avatar

Beautiful. I love love these idle thoughts. It touches my experience as a struggling junior dev who is using AI as away to gain enough experience by building more useful Apps. I live in Ghana West Africa.

You are really speaking and writing describing the heart of the hope and confusion we are living in.

Thanks for your efforts.

Please write more like this. Just speaking to us.

You experience of what is happening matters to us who are also seeing the hope of AI upgrading our skills and the unknowns.

Thanks you. God bless you🙏

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Josh Valdez's avatar

It’s wild to me that many very smart people I have worked with have no idea how radical software engineering is changing. I think part of it is if believing this is a huge paradigm shift would require reorienting beliefs around it and that for many is scary.

I 100% agree with Steve. Junior engineers that adopt AI will outpace senior engineer not using AI.

I compared my Claude Code usage with my former cofounder and my cost was 12x his! And we were building an agentic coding product!

The inclination to craft is too strong for many that grew up in the old world.

In my time at Uber, we replaced our database system about once every year or couple years. We say we’re building systems to last but many times they don’t. As engineers we should embrace iterating quickly.

I really resonate with the fleet of agents. I keep reflecting lately that we don’t actually know what the best interface for AI coding is yet. I can barely keep up with all the code Claude Code writes and that’s just one agent! Not even a fleet yet. Trying to manage a few instances of Claude Code is hard when I’ve tried it.

Both code review and product specs will look very different at the most AI forward companies in a year’s time.

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A student's avatar

You didn't even mention codex, which leapfrogged all of the tools before it. I actually can ask codex to do something and it responds with a PR! I don't need an AI to type along with me in my IDE, I need the AI to actually write all the code while I make coffee, and then I review it when I come back to my desk.

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Charlie Guo's avatar

yeah, i alluded to codex in the first section but didn’t call it out explicitly

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