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318 posts · showing 191–200
2026
10 posts-
What Employers Pay For When Code Itself Is Cheap
Companies were never buying code exactly, but code was a big enough share that the distinction rarely mattered. Five things remain when it's cheap — and the proxies that used to demonstrate them stop working.
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Who's Genuinely at Risk, and Why It Isn't About Seniority
The assumption is juniors are exposed and seniors are safe. The real variable is production versus judgment — which leaves some senior engineers in the exposed column and some juniors out of it.
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The Fear Is About Identity as Much as Employment
Push past "will I have a job" and something else surfaces: the thing you spent a decade becoming excellent at is now less scarce. That's a different problem, and it answers to different things.
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Output Went Up, Review Capacity Didn't
PR volume doubled and review capacity didn't, because review is human and got no faster. The number to watch isn't merge throughput — it's how fast approvals are arriving.
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What Actually Got Automated Away in Previous Software Waves
"Automation always creates more jobs" is too coarse to use. What each previous wave specifically removed — and what it left — is a much sharper predictor, and this wave's profile mostly matches.
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The Engineer Got Faster and the Team Got Smaller — Both Are Happening
The optimists and the pessimists are both describing real observations from different rooms. One variable decides which room you're in — and it isn't model capability.
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Cheaper Software Means More Software: The Demand Argument
Every previous drop in the cost of building software increased the number of builders. The mechanism is real and depends on one condition — which you can check in your own organization's backlog.
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Why 10× Productivity Doesn't Mean One-Tenth the Engineers
The arithmetic is clean and both halves are shaky: the multiplier applies to a fraction of the job, and the conclusion only follows if the amount of software anyone wants is fixed.
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The Parts of Your Job an Agent Can't See
The code, the tests, the tickets — that sounds like most of the job. What's missing is why the system is shaped this way, what's about to change, and what the requester meant rather than wrote.
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"Will AI Replace Engineers?" Is the Wrong Question — Ask Which Tasks
Jobs don't get automated whole — task bundles get rewritten around whatever became cheap. Two questions sort your week into what's exposed and what isn't, and the answer is often uncomfortable.