I've more or less accepted this, and I think my future is in making software more resilient, secure, and fault tolerant. These people will likely want to scale these solutions up, tie different solutions together, and generally make their lives increasingly difficult. Often without realizing it.

My experience is that Claude starts to make quite a mess in this context, and it'll often cause as many problems as it solves unless you have the technical and domain knowledge to redirect and correct it frequently. Perhaps training will solve this, and it'll certainly get better, but I'm not sure how far it'll go and how fast.

My gut feeling is that software will only become more ambitious and interface with hardware and other systems in increasingly sophisticated ways. Things that seemed infeasible due to time and cost constraints will be on the table. It'll reveal new challenges, I think. I have a feeling it'll be humans with deep technical skills who are at the forefront of solving those challenges for a while yet.

Not claiming I have the skills and to be one of those people, just that it's where I'm pushing my career at the moment.

I'm stoked that people like this have the resources and newfound capabilities to create solutions like this. The reality is that previously, many people have been underserved due to the economics of software and inherent risks of trying things like this as a smaller business owner. So this is great. We can find more ways that software can be valuable, and people can do their jobs better in ways they've literally only imagined before. It's great.

What could happen is a reduction in the amount of programs used, with a smaller set of more sophisticated programs doing more work. This maps to what we saw pre-industrial revolution: lots of small family operations doing menial manufacturing work (woodworking, textiles, cooking). This got replaced by large factories. A smaller amount of companies producing the a larger volume of goods. With AI, a smaller group of engineers could handle more local complexity, thus allowing more sophisticated, general purpose software to be created, deleting the sea of small pieces of software we have today.

Will this means many will be jobless? No, they would do other things. They'd be using this software to support society, operating at a high level. Think low-code, but incredibly complex stuff; just not raw code anymore. Instead of making circuit boards out of descrete components, you now slap a few ICs on a board with some supporting passives and the work is then all done in software. Engineers use more high-level components rather then welding and machinijng things from scratch; you buy T-slot profiles and bolts rather than casting and milling steel from billets.

So the job of programmer may disappear simmilar to how we don't have bakers anymore, baking is done in factories, operated by a small staff. Current-day programmers will then increasingly shift to whatever high-level constructs we'll come up with, this high level work will be supported by the base infrastructure that those who still touch raw code will build.

Are we sure Claude Scale™ won’t appear next month? A specialist agent that turns your vibe coded mess into a production grade scaled solution on their infrastructure.

Expect anthropic to want to capture more of the supply chain over time

What were you doing before, if not making resilient software?

I find that scalability is usually overblown because computers are fast now, which is not to say you shouldn't make it run fast on one computer.