I’m planning out my 2030 career in idle moments these days. I think it’ll be something akin to a carpenter who builds custom furniture.

I think we’ve barely scratched the surface of what software can do if it’s completely custom built, specifically for individuals or small businesses who could’ve never afforded it, pre-ai. Home automation, health and disease management, all sorts of administration, conversational ai over your life’s data - most people have no clue what’s possible once it’s custom built. With close attention, good design, creativity, and without giving away privacy or independence.

In my limited spare time I’m building up this tapestry of custom services for myself and my loved ones, and having a great time doing it, while trying to learn how I can offer this as a service.

Judging by the reactions I get when showing people what I can do with my phone, and no that’s not available on Google play, I think the demand will be there.

I think we're looking at the end of commodity software, the end of software companies, and birth of every single company writing their own everything. A proprietary soup everywhere, and 1-2 100X developers overseeing it all. And those few developers will spend their time in communications tutorials to get the staff to be able to explain what they want and need, so they can then make it happen for that company's exclusive use.

I mean, the same reason they do now. Time, taste, and amortized costs.

Just because it's faster and cheaper and requires less skill, doesn't mean it's instant and free and requires no skill.

No. The C-Suite is safe, very safe. I participated in an AI survey of what is the information that a C-Suite operates upon, and it is largely unwritten information, it is a suspicion and manipulation game with all the other c-suite players, and the middle managers beneath them as the battle ground. There are Peter Principled members that maintain their positions by executing the corporations legally grey dirty work, and then there are serious 100x non-engineers that can launch $100M initiatives in short notice, with successful experience doing so to create divisions and more.

I know the software engineering world like to think the C-Suite are disposable, but that is only because you really have no idea what they really do.

> C-suite is as likely to be automated as engineers.

Nah. C-suite has (a) money and (b) legal and fiscal obligation. You literally need a human being certain legal operations, like incorporation, salary, and lawsuits.

Middle management should be nervous. Plenty of people whose job it is to ask "is it done yet? when can I have it?!" -- they could be replaced today with better tooling and processes.

> I also understand the code.

and the product, the team, and (no matter how shallowly) the organizational pressures and politics. Whether we like it or not, those are part of the problems developers solve. Even something as rudimentary as knowing what is feasible to test given your deadline isn't something you can encode in a model[1]. Code does not exist in a vacuum.

I say this even with the latest models, it seems as soon as your development practice falls out of the ideals written up in blogposts of the previous ZIRP decade, you have to course correct. I use this term because the AI is technically correct (the best kind of correct) but practically useless, if not also irresponsible.

Recent anecdote (literally today): we've been having Claude write exhaustive test suites to eat at the coverage backlog. Lately, we noticed that tests in develop are even more flakier than usual. Our whole suite runs in 30-40min but lately it could exceed an hour and then fail.

It seems Claude took "exhaustive tests" to mean "exhaust the compute resources of the Jenkins node". What's worse is it wrote those tests for features that have been disabled and would soon be rewritten anyway.[1] I've always said that LLMs are great for generating test suites and this is the first time an LLM "failed" this assignment for me.

Code is cheap. The right code (or lack thereof) for the right situation takes meatspacebrainpower.

[1] The solution here is to run your company/team 100% as agents so they have the full context of project timelines, resources, customer feedback, etc. ala stevey and gtan but my reasons why I don't believe in that has already been articulated elsewhere.

That's where my 1-2 year buffer comes from.

AI is the ultimate generalist. You can make it do a lot of things well by asking the right questions. In a generalist job, many people can ask those questions.

I don't use AI that much. When I do, it's often surprisingly competent in the topics I'm a specialist in, and it can do a lot of good work quickly. But other people in other organizations still continue building upon my work instead of asking AI directly. Apparently because they don't know what to ask.

Nobody knows how long this will last. Hopefully long enough that I can afford to retire, because I'm old enough that I would face ageism if I had to find a different job.

And if we get there, we will probably have a serious political debate on how many digits should there be in the wealth tax rate.

I think people who were in mostly bs kind of roles, honestly.

I'm guessing it's the copy-paste CRUD apps that used to be plagiarized from stackoverflow. I'm with you, I've never seen an AI agent do good work.