Comment by jplusequalt
3 days ago
>the new era of swe will demand more and more long term business + product direction and relationship building skills
Why do you assume this to be the case? Look at your own company culture--has it not become increasingly siloed as people look to their own agents for most questions, tasks? What relationship skills are you building while talking to your chatbot all day?
>the trajectory leads us to all becoming mini-ceos directing our company of agents
Only if you completely misunderstand how business and economics works. The price of code is falling because it's turning into a commodity. The amount of people needed to produce it is drastically decreasing.
We consume more food than ever, but the % of people who work to produce food is far smaller than it was 150 years ago.
> has it not become increasingly siloed as people look to their own agents for most questions, tasks
doesn't feel like it, collaboration is more important than ever for high level direction even if nobody pair programs anymore. relationships feel more important than ever especially customer ones. theres no RL environment for competing in business
> We consume more food than ever, but the % of people who work to produce food is far smaller than it was 150 years ago.
Yes, because there is a limit to human desire for food, as we tend to get full. is there a limit to humanity's appetite for software? I would posit probably not, because software is infinitely abstractable and can be applied to any industry and domain
the price of code is falling but the value of differentiated ideas and market alpha is rising. human attention is scarce - as the mini-ceo with your army of agents, how will you compete with the other mini-ceos with their army of agents that can produce software at a whim?
> We consume more food than ever, but the % of people who work to produce food is far smaller than it was 150 years ago.
I’m not sure this analogy works. In fact I’d argue it’s the opposite. Food is an example of something that is relatively stable in terms of consumption per capita. There’s only so much food a person can eat, so if you make it easier to produce, then jobs producing it go down, as we’ve seen. But software isn’t like that at all. There’s essentially no end to how much software we can consume, and so as it becomes cheaper to produce, we’ll likely produce it in even larger quantities. Again, as we’ve seen.
> We consume more food than ever, but the % of people who work to produce food is far smaller than it was 150 years ago.
You need to normalize that with world population, or a bigger population and a smaller percentage could be the same number of people.
Of course it is still a bit simple, because the distribution will not be uniform per country.
Then we need to know why 150 and see how other numbers look like, ideally per region. My guess is industrial revolution but it is mixed with different timings and political events in different places.
Regarding
> What relationship skills are you building while talking to your chatbot all day?
Obviously talking to the client, or does your llm power itself on and starts working without any input from you?