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jillesvangurp 4 hours ago

There's going to be plenty of work helping other companies make some sense of their vibe coded efforts. The value of individual projects might decrease, but there will be a lot more of them. And without help they won't actually work out all that well.

I talked to a company that does not employ software engineers that were doing some things with Claude Code a few weeks ago. Insightful comment: I want that person to do what I hired them to do, not mess around with code. What they were trying to do was a bit out of their comfort zone and they were smart enough to realize it.

There is going to be a lot more of this. What's very real is that companies selling one size fits all products to others are going to have a much harder time selling because everybody is going to expect a thing tailored to them because they now can. Delivering those things is still going to be work that needs to be done. A lot of work actually. People with experience building things with their own hands have an advantage. And if those people also understand the domain in which they are trying to do stuff, that's a double advantage.

Like always, most people haven't got a clue about what they actually need. Figuring out what people need (consulting) and then delivering it has always been the job. But you might be able to take on a few more customers now. There won't be a shortage of those once people figure out software just got cheaper.

watwut 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> Insightful comment: I want that person to do what I hired them to do, not mess around with code.

What does that mean? Who is that person who should not mess with the code?

morganf 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I agree strongly with that comment you are quoting.

It means (at least in my interpretation): different people think differently; a great salesman thinks very differently than a great software developer. And the AI wave is trying to force lots of everyday normal employees (who may or may not be good at their jobs already) to think and act like software developers. A great salesman may literally not have the type of mind where we can turn what he does into "processes" and "documentation" like we need to do to make agents. Most humans, by far, don't think in a "process" sort of way, and trying to get them to do so is a path towards disaster on many levels.

This is why most AI digital transformation is failing. Making a creative artist or a salesman or a chef or account manager or whatever into "one of us" (a someone who thinks explicitly about process-itizing everything etc) is, the fallacy of.... well, to use an old Yiddish expression: "if my grandma had balls, she'd be my grandpa." (Sorry for the vulgar image.) It's asking people to be a completely different type of person than they are, and that almost never succeeds.

I've done a lot digital transformation (pre-AI) and my approach was always to not try to change people, but to have a small group of smart process-oriented thinkers go into teams and work hand in hand with them to turn what they do into processes.

PS: all this is said as someone who loves AI and is a huge fan and has invested heavily in it.

Philip-J-Fry 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think they're saying that the people who aren't software developers are playing around with Claude Code. And that's not what their job is and it's not what they understand. It's all good empowering people who aren't software developers but at the same time, it's not worth running your business on tools and software no one in your business understands. You need someone there who knows what they're talking about, even if it is just as a mentor.

embedding-shape 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I understood it as "code is a means to an end", lots of developers get stuck on just writing and maintaining code, often missing that the business that pay them don't give a damn (for better or worse) about the code or design itself, just that whatever goal they set are being met in the timeline they set.

3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]
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