I’ve seen experienced software developers make impressive stuff with AI. I haven’t seen anything interesting made with AI by non-developers. They make a landing page or something. It’s just… barely anything. It’s a nothing of a project.
We use AI a lot at work, and the developers are vastly better at getting AI to do what we need than the non-developers. AI is a tool, and like any tool, it takes effort to learn how to use it effectively. And so far, the skills to use AI effectively are something I’ve only seen in software developers.
I don’t think product people are going to replace devs. Ever. I agree that I think a dispersal is more likely than an outright crash.
I was the first dev at my current company to experiment with Claude Code back when it first came out. Some of my coworkers tried it, and some didn’t like it at all.
But now literally all of us are using it. The company gives us a $100 monthly stipend for it. We’re a small dev team, but our CEO is thrilled. He keeps bragging about how customers are gobsmacked by how quickly we’re delivering new features and he’s been asked if we’ve made a ton of hires in the last year. We’re actually down two developers from when I started.
I don’t love the code it writes, but the speed is unbeatable. We still need devs, and I don’t think that’s ever going to change. But we don’t need as many devs. We’re shipping like crazy with a small team. I don’t think more people would speed us up much at all.
Where I work, we hired a developer that was supposed to be familiar with SQL. It turns out, he can't even write simple queries (and spends 0 time outside of work getting up to speed).
The director purchased a subscription to Claude and will most likely get rid of him at the beginning of the new year, because the job can pretty much be automated at this point.
Many Marketing/copyrighting people have also been laid off over the last year due to the same reasons.
"I don’t love the code it writes, but the speed is unbeatable. We still need devs"
I think this will be the problem going forward: Less positions to fill and the same amount of potential candidates. You will need to have more experience and credentials to compete.
This is what I'm seeing in the design market. With Figma Make, you can write a prompt, tell it to use your design library, generate a flow, and then hand it off to developers and say "Hey, look at this, can you implement this?". Alternatively, you can use Cursor/Claude Code/Codex to pull in Figma design system elements via MCP, and generate flows that way. You can push features so much faster with the same or fewer people, and lets be honest, pushing more features in less time is the #1 metric at a lot of companies even if they claim otherwise.
I find it to be sometimes easier to utilize my Figma library to design what I want as I generally don't have to do rework. It gets annoying after awhile to waste tokens and context dealing with stupid small things like "Hey, the icon in the icon button is wrong." if you do prompting. Pulling in the same icon & icon button through a MCP is generally easier.
Presumably you can iterate on and manually tweak the design first, which is much quicker and less cumbersome than iterating on and tweaking the design when it's in clunky HTML/CSS/JS form and all the non-vector graphical assets are flattened/cropped etc.
I own a small agency and it’s the same for me, but that doesn’t explain the urgency nor the layoffs in the big companies. Yes we are not hiring juniors, but we still hire seniors because they are now more productive. That’s not what we are seeing in big companies.
To me it’s the cumulated effects of many things happening coincidentally:
- Massive offshoring
- Money becoming scarce after the ZIRP era and in the recession except for AI investments
- Near monopoly positions that allow layoffs as a strategy to push stock price, without penalty for the decline in quality (enshittification)
- Cherry on the top, LLMs being able to do the work of juniors when used by seniors
If it was only about AI productivity we wouldn’t see this urgency.
> I can't think of a single time where having someone else review my work or give me feedback is a meaningfully bad thing
I have ample examples, unfortunately. I had a coworker whom I liked as a person, but had a nasty habit of using PRs as a way to hijack all decision making. He’d leave PR feedback for his personal preferences and mark them as “changes requested.”
Everyone feels like an asshole giving an approval when someone has requested changes, so you had to comply with all of his preferences if you wanted to merge your code.
I’ve had several companies where I submitted a PR and had someone say, “You’re guarding against an edge case that won’t happen. This is over engineered. Remove it.”
And it made it less than a week in production before we hit the edge case that I’d been forced to neglect.
I had a team come to me with a request, so I built it. They were thrilled. Then another engineer was like, “I don’t like (some technical detail). You need to change (major architectural decision).”
I gave the re-architected version to the team who requested it and they said, “Wait, I loved what you built before. What is this? I don’t want this!”
This post resonated with me pretty hard. Hire good people and deputize them to make decisions. You’ll end up with something good more often than not. I’ve never seen design-by-committee produce a great product.
I’ve had too many experiences with seeing decent contributions get worse and worse as they go through successive rounds of feedback.
> I’ve had too many experiences with seeing decent contributions get worse and worse as they go through successive rounds of feedback.
This is a great observation. Having a PR feedback process that involves everyone commenting on every tiny decision is a guaranteed way to end up with "design by committee" syndrome. Everyone feels obligated to push their little agenda, no matter how insignificant it may be. The end result is what the original article tries to explain: When everyone is responsible for every PR, no one is really responsible for any PR. The quality and suitability of the code are not proportional to the volume of feedback the pull request receives. There is a sweet spot, and beyond that, quality and development velocity deteriorate quickly
As a musician, this happens to me as well. If I hear a piece of music in a noisy environment my brain will fill in the gaps. I’ll think, “Wow, this music is really interesting.”
Then I’ll hear it in a quiet environment and realize that I preferred the version where my brain adding things to make up for what I couldn’t hear before.
I guess it’s a little like diffusion. The brain has natural denoising processes which, in an unconscious way, taps into our tastes.
Before the ACA, insurance companies were allowed to have these things called “lifetime limits.”
Basically, once your healthcare got expensive, they could just cut you off and say they wouldn’t cover you any further. And because of pre-existing conditions (which the ACA also eliminated), you couldn’t get new health insurance. You were basically fucked.
My mom got cancer a few years before the ACA passed. So far as I’m concerned, the old insurance system killed my mom when she was only 40 years old. I lost my only surviving parent, and my little brother lost his mom when he was only 10 years old. So forgive the utterly flabbergasted look on my face as I read your comment.
So many distortion pedals use an op amp to run a signal into antiparallel diodes to create distortion. I’ve spent a few weeks trying to emulate it, and it’s a lot of fun.
Different flavors of diode make significant changes to the way it sounds. Even things like LEDs can be used (they are Light Emitting Diodes, after all).
Andy Simper of Cytomic is some kind of mad genius at this stuff. He’s created a painstakingly accurate emulation of the Ibanez Tube Screamer that allows you to change the values of basically every component in the circuit diagram. It’s jaw dropping: https://cytomic.com/product/scream/
He’s also shared a ton of incredible information about how he emulates circuits. The math can get really intense. If anyone is looking for a fun project, I strongly suggest experimenting with circuit modeling. It’s a great workout for the brain.
Because I have neither the time nor inclination to make it at home right now. I have other stuff I need to do.
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