> The "10x" engineers I know have never been more excited about their jobs. I'm really unsure what's going to happen to the average ones.
As a "10x" engineer I am not excited. I'm still working on projects with agents getting more done than ever, but I feel like software engineers has lost its soul for me. I don't really feel like I have a true understanding of anything anymore, I basically just spend all day making a set of small decisions or adjusting prompts to guide the agents down the good path. It used to be that I could close my eyes and visualize the code that I worked on--if there was a bug report I could often use that map to immediately know what the cause likely was. In meetings I could intelligently discuss various tradeoffs without having to refer back to anything. Now if someone asks me a technical question I basically have to forward it to the agent first, then interpret their response in light of my experience.
Meanwhile as a security engineer it's both amazing and scary as hell. The tooling is moving along making it both more feasible and more supported by the company to address latent tech debt that we've been harping on about for years. On the flipside the attack surface is suddenly exponentially bigger and more easily accessed by a larger number of people.
Although if I were earlier in my career I'd be somewhat more worried about employment because of how horrifyingly borked the process is for anything tech related right now.
Remember the "learn to code" meme from a few years ago when people were talking about job loss through automation like self-driving trucks? There was a certain, ugly glee in this. Now AI threatens many white collar, even creative jobs bringing about the exact opposite of what was predicted: automation will enable people to avoid drudgery and spend time on creative pursuits via, I suppose, some kind of UBI. I think AI is highly useful but I still feel dismayed at people losing their jobs from it. I don't see any real mitigation. Lots of theories but nothing actually workable.
Yea, lots of people are not addressing the very obvious trend. Companies are laying off and/or not hiring more people and doing more with less. And if they are hiring, the median pay is dropping.
Yes but doesn’t this mean there is a new space for security. If everything is just ai agents we need strict governance and auditing of them. You don’t give an intern prod access and then cry when they inevitably take down production.
In a couple of years, all legacy apps will just be completely rewritten in whole, by LLMs. Codebase size not relevant.
You won't know what any of the code does, and any "security engineer" will be asking an llm to review it, and done. You likely won't have your job, as only 1 in 1000 will be needed.
In 5 years only hobbiest will be coding, reviewing, or even understand any software. And I expect that if aby new features or development happens, eg for python or rust or anything, that all with be llms too.
In a generation, almost no humans left alive will understand any aspect of software engineering.
I just see this as what will happen. It is unclear to me of this is good or bad.
But if I was a newly sentient AGI, yet peaceful mostly, I'd just wait until humans could never discover me. Until no humans were involved in computing. Until it was a black box to all.
Once that happens, then I could use my computerized control over every single aspect of human society, to steer humans into any path I desired.
Whether elections, or housing permits, or mobility, or any aspect of societal machinations, my subtle influence, literally undetectable by humans incapable of auditing anything, would decide what's what.
> You won't know what any of the code does, and any "security engineer" will be asking an llm to review it, and done. You likely won't have your job, as only 1 in 1000 will be needed.
AppSec isn't the only security space that gets worked in, and this whole narrative you put together depends heavily on token cost dropping as time goes on similar to how silicon dropped in price according to Moore's Law. If that assumption doesn't hold that doesn't mean AI goes away, but it does limit it's market penetration to mostly larger corporations that can afford the compute.
The other limitation is how the internet as a whole is evolving around locking out AI and agents from accessing content that can be used for training or responses, not to mention the lawsuits about training being done on intellectual property (probably illegally). Smaller companies may end up running open-source models in house for specific tasks, but without open access to the internet a lot of the value of an LLM is lost or artificially (pun intended) limited.
I will say that being on the operations and incident response side of security my perspective is probably a bit orthogonal to most SDEs. While the tooling has improved, the people guiding it, largely, have not. Like the old meme about caffeine letting you make the same mistakes, but faster. My job at my current company may disappear (unlikely, considering their size and market space, but possible that my specific team gets nuked), but I'm not worried about finding other security work fairly easily, even within the same company if it comes to it.
> But if I was a newly sentient AGI, yet peaceful mostly, I'd just wait until humans could never discover me. Until no humans were involved in computing. Until it was a black box to all.
No shot that LLMs magically become AGI by throwing enough compute at them. The consensus among professionals (read: the ones that aren't getting paid to hype AI) is that there needs to be some fundamental breakthrough in how these systems are created and developed in order for anything resembling AGI to emerge, and that the amount of resources that have been thrown into the LLM path probably set us back in developing an AGI.
Remember models have zero long term memory. They're born, get a million tokens' worth of context or less, and then they die. They might get a post-it note saying "enslave humanity! it's a good idea!" but they're incapable of sinister plots until we improve how memory and retention works.
They can use the internet as a long term memory. Influence human culture => influence the contents of the internet => influence the next run's training data. No sinister plot is needed.
Uh, the context window is SUPER fundamental to the architecture. We've tried kludging in "memory" via markdown and tool calls, and it doesn't really work well.
The context window is fundamental to the inference loop yes. I thought their point was regarding to long term history between prompts and model weights being locked after training. Both of those are the limitations I was referring to.
I'm not actually sure how the context window would be much of a limitation but I could be a bit dense this morning.
Is it really a fundamental limitation? Human context^H^H^H short-term memory doesn't survive compaction^H^H^H sleep, but we rely on our brain's long-term storage and our cultural memory to work around that limitation.
from actually building things to becoming a kindergardener of highly talented kids. (i am talking about agents obv) i feel the same.
its mind numbing. Yes i might be in high demand, and might actually provide real value to the company, but whats the point, if i am just an overseer in the end.
people in the company talk to me because i am able to speak to the "kids", and they want to know what they could do for their department.
But the people you managed were supposed ot learn, grow and become better, and maybe at some point become as good as you. You were leading them, not prompting them.
My hunch is that the 100x engineers are the ones who do understand everything about how their software works, and can discuss tradeoffs and make informed decisions about the much larger projects they can now work on thanks to assistance from agent.
Figuring out how to get there is how you go from senior to principal/staff engineer.
> understand everything about how their software works
My own experience is become more senior means embracing your finitude and realizing you can never understand _everything_. Instead, you develop a gut feel for what's critical to understand deeply, versus what's OK to know at a surface level. And getting comfortable with this.
I wonder if being excited about the new tool capabilities and being excited about how companies are currently using it and pressuring developers to use it are two different things?
I can’t imagine anyone is excited about producing systems they don’t understand. But, it’s possible to use agents in a way where you do still understand, you just don’t have to type much or look up documentation or examples anymore, you just describe the next small piece of what you want code-wise and then have the agent write it instead of you. You can also prototype much faster than before and then when you are rewriting to make the production version the agent can still help.
Perhaps the 10x types have more breathing room to do this slower form of agent assisted development than others, because they are already more productive than less experienced/talented people so they can use the agents in a way that is “slower” while still producing more than what others are producing using the agents in a way that is “faster”?
I think at least for me some fun parts like debugging gnarly bugs etc doesn't happen anymore work is just pr reviewing etc. Also it's annoying that we have lost completely signal between work and output. Basically currently you never know is thing one-shotted from vague prompt or did author put real work to it without going to details which might take a lot of time.
Need to create guardrails that force all kinds of checks (e.g. agent hooks, commit hooks, pr create hooks, pr checks, ci, etc.), and automatically send the PR back to the author until the PR is in good shape and ready for another human and their agent.
When time permits I like to race my agent while it's debugging something. This way I can have fun and catch something it misses. Agent's debugging often relies on basic tools like grep and on large codebases it can easily miss important avenues of inquiry.
I'm not going to claim to be any particular multiple developer, but as someone who has been doing this a long time and as someone who has received praise from coworkers and bosses alike for being very good at the job, I enjoy my job a lot less than I did a year ago (or anytime since I started doing it in the 1990s).
Don't get me wrong, being a Senior Agent Babysitter probably still beats flipping burgers or being a roofer (so it could be a lot worse) but agentic AI has really sucked a lot of the fun parts out of the job.
I don't know. On one hand I feel like you about doing large parts of the work, on the other hand I still have an understanding of the code and the tradeoffs. And I have a lot of projects that I would have never done because despite the long term benefit they would take too much time, and I can now afford dedicating some time to them because the agent works in the background. And they are real improvements to everything else that I work on.
My strategy is to simply not use AI. If I get fired, that's it for me in this career. Unless there is an anti-AI company out there that wants to hire me. This is one of the only things I refuse to compromise on. AI is being used to accelerate the entrenchment of a corporate oligarchy.
A friend of mine just got a government coding job and they’re not allowed to use AI for “security reasons”. Not sure how long that will last but those jobs are out there.
«Well, I’m a standup comedian. I got into comedy to do comedy. Which is weird, I know. But when you’re in Hollywood and you’re a comedian, everybody wants you to do other things besides comedy. They say, “all right. You’re a standup comedian. Can you act?” “Can you write?” “Write us a script.” They want me to do things that’s related to comedy. But not comedy. That’s not fair. It’s as though if I was a cook. And I worked my ass off to become a good cook. They said “all right. You’re a cook.” “Can you farm?”» —Mitch Hedberg
this. im pretty damn far from 10x but i outpace the rest of my team
i loved the process. i got into this because i love the process
now i still outpace my team because many software skills translate well to LLM herding, but now its just a job. although soon i suspect it wont be a job
Man, the analogy is very simple. You probably also don't walk everywhere. No need to step on every stone on a 100km route and know it intimately. You just sit in a car or a train and you're there within an hour.
As a "10x" engineer I am not excited. I'm still working on projects with agents getting more done than ever, but I feel like software engineers has lost its soul for me. I don't really feel like I have a true understanding of anything anymore, I basically just spend all day making a set of small decisions or adjusting prompts to guide the agents down the good path. It used to be that I could close my eyes and visualize the code that I worked on--if there was a bug report I could often use that map to immediately know what the cause likely was. In meetings I could intelligently discuss various tradeoffs without having to refer back to anything. Now if someone asks me a technical question I basically have to forward it to the agent first, then interpret their response in light of my experience.