[zerbinxx]

It’s already currently true that many mid-tier shops employ an army of low-knowledge practitioners who will always “solve” whatever problem you give them in record time by abusing the tools you give them, reinventing wheels, punching semi-truck-sized holes in otherwise functional abstractions, barely testing anything. All is well until scaling problems or distributing desyncronization bugs or severe data-loss/replication happens in production.

Once you’ve seen this happen, and especially when you see it cause outages that costs thousands of dollars, you understand why it’s worth it to “pay more than you need”. When the rubber hits the road, having an army of automata who “get things done” is functionally not the same as having skilled developers who own their craft in the long term.

If I were starting a company today I’d probably be fine taking on some tech debt to get v1 out the door and then worry about investing in a dev team who can scale/rewrite it into the version that can scale to whatever level I need. But in no way would I want to ever again watch a junior dev who doesn’t understand how to read logs trying to implement a caching + crontask solution to reduce app load times from 30s to 15s on a backend query against a table that holds 10k records, because their code retries 500 times because they don’t understand timeouts, indices, or ORM induced n+1 issues.

In the long term, automaton armies will always curse you to the problems of local min/maxima problems unless they are backed up by someone with enough global vision to get them out of that hole.