I agree with this sentiment, though it's a slightly odd future. I've been running custom forks of various open source software that I just customise through pure vibe coding testing it into a working solution for some custom thing I want to do. But it seems inefficient everyone doing that.

It’s selection bias. It’s always been selection bias.

The “10x” developers I’ve known (and been) were all incredibly effective at snagging the work that they personally were most able to do quickly, and shirking the rest.

That’s not necessarily all the difference. But I’d estimate they would maybe be at most 2x developers if you remove their ability to avoid the proverbial 10% of the work that takes 90% of the effort.

AI coding intensifies this effect. And it also helps explain why people’s amazing success stories for personal projects don’t seem to translate to business ROI. For a side project I am in complete control over design and scope, have no customers or stakeholders to keep happy, etc. So I easily - and mostly unconsciously - tailor what I’m doing to what the coding agent can do well, and quietly drop the rest. I don’t have that luxury at work.

I agree, understanding the code does not save us. Knight Capital wrote every line of their code but it didn’t prevent a $440 million loss in under an hour [0].

Regarding wisdom, I do not mean knowledge of how the system works. That is a thing, too, where the person who built it is the only one who understands it. That’s not what I meant here.

In the examples of my coworkers, for example, I see at least two things:

1. The things they create are 90% well crafted, 30% well engineered. If they were building a rocket, every part would be well machined to high precision. Then when we assemble the rocket, we find out it’s too heavy to ever get off the ground. That’s a kind of wisdom gap.

2. They work in a way that excludes everyone else on the team. From their perspective, they are wondering why everyone else isn’t getting on board. But it’s a situation where one person understands it, and their deep understanding of it contributes to them moving fast, and then add AI and now the ground is shifting faster than anyone else can understand enough to contribute. This is another kind of wisdom gap, knowing how to get a team performing at a high level, versus an individual contributor performing at a high level.

This is where, from your perspective, you’re driving a speed boat as fast as you can, wondering why your coworkers aren’t on board. But from their perspective, they’re following your boat in their boats, but your boat is creating waves behind it and splashing water up, so their experience is a bumpy ride getting water splashed in their face constantly while they’re yelling “hey can you slow down up there?” From your perspective, it makes no sense to slow down. You’re not experiencing any problems. Yet both perspectives are still true.

The person who is charging forward as fast as possible also seems to be the one who has less experience operating and supporting systems, understanding how systems fail in unexpected ways, and so forth. Every week I have a conversation where someone tells me, “oh, I didn’t consider it might fail in that way”, and every time I think, yeah it would have been really nice if we’d had a 20 minute conversation 6 weeks ago when you started.

In general, it’s not that “other people just haven’t figured out the tools yet”, it’s also a significant part of who’s leading each initiative. I could absolutely do what my coworker does and setup my custom harness to pull off amazing stunts of productivity. I just think it’s irresponsible much of the time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Capital_Group