Comment by jbs789
5 days ago
Repeat of the cycle where companies moved to the cloud, now locked in.
Move engineering to Claude, then locked in.
What’s played out at the infra level will now play out at the software engineer level… is that analogous…?
Spot on, the size of backend teams reduced drastically as we made the progression through cloud, serverless, SaaS, iPaaS, and now agent orchestration tooling.
What would be a team of about 20 devs a decade ago, are usually about 5 persons across all project roles.
Hence when someone says their job is AI safe, I can only understand they weren't affected by such "progress".
I'd argue it's different because ephemeral, vps, baremetal, self-hosted, the skillset is still "managing a linux server" and the most radical shift is to an expectation that a server is a thing that is created and destroyed on demand (so now you need to script deployment), which isn't really a radical shift away from the skillset.
The goal of AI seems to pretty explicitly be "stop coding; from now on the mechanic fixes your car", which I would argue is a very different shift.
Also if you host a criminal content on AWS they probably close your account and ban you instead of silently rerouting all traffic away from your server (which may just be hosting a game where you kill goblins or steal cars or something) and refusing to acknowledge that that's what's happening.
Ya if you just run VMs but now a lot of cloud vendors have you build stuff using their proprietary features so decoupling becomes harder and can be risky.