We didn’t fire all our developers when we invented compilers either, and for much the same reason we didn’t stop hiring laborers when we first built ships and established overseas trade routes: business will always expand to meet its reach
Many enterprises are currently exploring to see if they can invite developers to leverage AI tools—like they leveraged the compiler—to be more productive. To operate on a higher plane of agency, collaborating on what we should be building and not just technical execution. Those actively hostile or just checked out with the idea of relearning skills are being laid off. (Some unprofitable business sections are being swept up opportunistically too.) The idea that all developers would be fired if AI tools can write good code doesn’t meet the lessons of history
We’ve had the sycophant problem for as long as people have held power over other people, and the answer has always been “put 3-5 workers in a room and make them compete for the illusion of favor.”
I have been doing this with coding agents across LLM providers for a while now, with very successful results. Grok seems particularly happy to tell Anthropic where it’s cutting corners, but I get great insights from O3 and Gemini too.
A big difference between crypto and AI is around how crypto could paint a better future once we rebuilt most of our transactional infrastructure and persuaded a quorum to move onto it, and how I personally am benefiting from AI day by day to build myself tools and infrastructure for my life, work, businesses and finances only requires me to accept this change. Everyone else in the world could reject AI-augmented engineering, and I will still be tremendously better off.
I am not a game developer, just a developer and a gamer, so please forgive what may be a goofy question: have you seen or engineered systems that capped the level designers' resources? For a super simplified example, I think of Forge in the Halo series, and I'm pretty sure Forge had a certain amount of monopoly money that gamer-designers ran out of eventually. Would such systems be infeasible more for political reasons than technical?
Many enterprises are currently exploring to see if they can invite developers to leverage AI tools—like they leveraged the compiler—to be more productive. To operate on a higher plane of agency, collaborating on what we should be building and not just technical execution. Those actively hostile or just checked out with the idea of relearning skills are being laid off. (Some unprofitable business sections are being swept up opportunistically too.) The idea that all developers would be fired if AI tools can write good code doesn’t meet the lessons of history