[turlockmike]

How many kernel devs does the world need? A dozen or two?

It will be the same with software. AI will be writing and consuming most software. We will be utilizing experiences built on top of that, probably generated in real time for hyper personalization. Every app on your phone will be replaced by one app. (Except maybe games, at least for a short while longer).

Everyone's treating writing code as this reverent thing. No one wrote code 100 years ago. Very few today write assembly. It will become lost because the economic neccesity is gone.

It's the end of an era, but also the beginning of a new one. Building agentic systems is really hard, a hard enough problem that we need a ton of people building those systems. AI hardware devices have barely been registered, we need engineers who can build and integrate all sorts of systems.

Engineering as a discipline will be the last job to be automated, since who do you think is going to build all the worlds automation?

[vdqtp3]

> How many kernel devs does the world need? A dozen or two?

You're low by several orders of magnitude. "The 2025 development cycle saw 2,134 developers contribute to [Linux] kernel 6.18" [1]

[1] https://commandlinux.com/statistics/linux-kernel-contributor...

[rafterydj]

How wildly dismissive of the foundation of the X$ billion dollar software industry. You think humans just stumbled into writing code by accident or something?

How does building agentic systems, a "really hard" problem, not just end up a "regular code" problem? Because that is what it is. A distributed systems problem with non-deterministic run lengths. How do you switch agent contexts? Similar to how you solve regular program context switching. How do you search tool capabilities and verify them? How do you effectively manage scheduled tasks?

Oh, look, you've just invented the operating system kernel. Suddenly, those 'dozen or two' experts don't seem so archaic after all!

[oblio]

Does it even make sense to build everything on top of machines that are 70% reliable? The sheer orchestration and validation overhead at scale risks being more expensive than just keeping most software engineers and having them manage a few AI agents.

Also, 200 years ago we didn't have bike mechanics. Car mechanics. Boat mechanics. Plumbers. Electricians. Not all new professions fade away.