[sdeframond]

Software engineers are not artists nor shoemakers. They are factory makers.

A good analyst makes a hand-crafted, custom report in a day. A programmer makes a factory that makes thousands of reports per second for a thousand clients.

I am yet to find a factory at HomeGoods.

Now the kind of factories we make might change, but isn't it the fun part?

[xpct]

> Now the kind of factories we make might change, but isn't it the fun part?

No, I don't think it's the fun part. Judging by the number of people glooming over LLMs, not many people seem excited about it.

[brandensilva]

It is definitely the fun part to me and scaling a factory is the challenge we all decide every day we write code.

I think of AI agents as a factory unlock too.

Anything of quality needs inspection, review, and so on before you ship it. The human in the loop step is critical for value delivery.

Many software companies don't think of themselves as factories but they ship a product to a million customers and it solves a work unit of value for each customer.

Now AI agents may eventually reach a similar potential where many kinds of work can be manufactured by an agent.

The difference I think we are saying as engineers is shipping code isn't the unit of value if you want to turn a code agent into a code factory. It's just a byproduct of the value. Code is the liability, tool, or contract to delivering the value. Poor engineering results in poor output that cannot scale or poor quality that no one wants.

Without us inspecting and reviewing the output you risk the value not being delivered. Also without us, in the past you don't have a factory to begin (although vibe coding has collapsed how soon people can setup a software factory now), scaling it takes engineering effort. We build the factory and also ensure it is operating well to deliver that value to customers.

The ability for a program for loop to do a million iterations is foundational to our knowledge. AI agents just scale that up and is one of the tools we use to get there.

I'm not scared of agents making code cheap. I just see them as another tool in the arsenal to build scalable systems now. Yes some people don't need to scale and some don't need anything of quality. That's fine and is welcomed to improving people's lives. If they want to scale or need a quality factory line they come to us to deliver that still.

I think it's myopic to think this isn't coming. But it's also short sighted to assume our value is gone at building, shipping, and operating factories.

[Joel_Mckay]

Great programmers learn all documents are high latency state-machines.

A "Report" is just a document feature projection.

People may initially think this is in err, then think again... =3

[WalterBright]

I remember when the Mac made everyone a publisher.