[gmt2027]

If AI increases the productivity of a single engineer between 10-100x over the next decade, there will be a seismic shift in the industry and the tech giants will not walk away unscathed.

There are coordination costs to organising large amounts of labour. Costs that scale non-linearly as massive inefficiencies are introduced. This ability to scale, provide capital and defer profitability is a moat for big tech and the silicon valley model.

If a team of 10 engineers become as productive as a team of 100-1000 today, they will get serious leverage to build products and start companies in domains and niches that are not currently profitable because the middle managers, C-Suite, offices and lawyers are expensive coordination overhead. It is also easier to assemble a team of 10 exceptional and motivated partners than 1000 employees and managers.

Another way to think about it is what happens when every engineer can marshal the AI equivalent of $10-100m dollars of labour?

My optimistic take is that the profession will reach maturity when we become aware of the shift in the balance of power. There will be more solo engineers and we will see the emergence of software practices like the ones doctors, lawyers and accountants operate.

[darkwater]

This is a really interesting take that I don't see often in the wild. Actually, it's the first time I read someone saying this. But I think you are definitely onto something, especially if costs of AI are going to lower faster than expected even a few weeks ago.

[kragen]

I'm tempted by this vision, though that in itself makes me suspicious that I'm indulging in wishful thinking. Also lutusp wrote a popular article promoting it about 45 years ago, predicting that no companies like today's Microsoft would come to exist.

A thing to point out is that management is itself a skill, and a difficult one, one where some organizations are more institutionally competent than others. It's reasonable to think of large-organization management as the core competency of surviving large organizations. Possibly the hypothetical atomizing force you describe will create an environment where they are poorly adapted for continuing survival.

[AznHisoka]

To play devils advocate, the main obstacle in launching a product doesn't involve the actual development/coding. Unless you're building something in hard-tech, it's relatively easy to build the run of the mill software.

The obstacles are in marketing, selling it, building a brand/reputation, integrating it with lots of 3rd party vendors, and supporting it.

So yes, you can build your own Salesforce, or your own Adobe Photoshop with a one-man crew much faster and easier. But that doesn't mean you, as an engineer can now build your own business selling it to companies who don't know anything about you.

[svilen_dobrev]

a (tile-placing) guy who was rebuilding my bathrooms, told this story:

when he was greener, he happened to work with some old fart... who managed to work 10x faster than others, with this trick: put all the tiles on the wall with a diluted cement-glue very quick, then moving one tile forces most other tiles around to move as well.. so he managed to order all the tiles in very short time.

As i never had the luxury of decent budget, since long time ago i was doing various meta-programming things, then meta-meta-programming.. up to extent of say, 2 people building and managing and enjoying a codebase of 100KLOC (python) + 100KLOC js... ~~30% generated static and unknown %% generated-at-runtime - without too much fuss or overwork.

But it seems that this road has been a dead end... for decades. Less and less people use meta-programming, it needs too deep understanding ; everyone just adds yet-another (2y "senior") junior/wanna-be to copy-paste yet another crud.

So maybe the number of wanna-bees will go down. Or "senior" would start meaning something.. again. Or idiotically-numbing-stoopid requirements will stop appearing..

[kragen]

When I meta-meta-program, I sometimes waste a lot of time debugging.

[WXLCKNO]

Like darkwater's comment, this is my first time seeing this take and I like it a lot.

I hate the idea of building a business to hundreds/thousands of employees, I love startups and small but highly profitable businesses.

Having productivity be unleashed in this way with a small team of people I trust would be amazing.

[Aloisius]

As long as the output of AI is not copyrightable, there will be demand for human engineers.

After all, if your codebase is largely written by AI, it becomes entirely legal to copy it and publish it online, and sell competing clones. That's fine for open source, but not so fine for a whole lot of closed source.