> It's now much more efficient to pay for a senior or staff engineer and set them up with a subscription to claude or codex.

this has been happening for years though. just think of cloud computing and things like kubernetes: a single person or a small team can handle the amount of computer that twenty years ago required a full team of sysadmins, a facility (either on premise or datacenter space), huge (upfront!) capital expenditure and ongoing costs (connectivity and power).

same goes for web frameworks (think rails and similar)

Ok, but all of these technologies have bounded impact, and they present new abstractions that need to be learned by engineers.

Coding agents are different in that they are unbounded in the tasks they can do (although reliability is an issue), and you can work with them the same way you work with other engineers (e.g. via natural language).

Also, coding agent capabilities are advancing much faster than people can sit down and learn their limitations. All the tricks we learned for Opus 5 became obsolete in a couple months with Opus 5.5.