The Death of Software Engineering by a Thousand Prompts

Summary

My wife is working on an idea for a social platform. She’s been using Lovable to build it. Over the past week, she’s made very good progress independently but once a day she would get stuck because the AI isn’t doing what she’s expecting. Unfortunately, she doesn’t know full-stack development well enough to prompt it towards resolution or how to edit the code herself. When that happens, I come to her rescue. Verdi, the Super unblocker Her side project gave me a sense of the future. My thesis is that AI will fragment the role of software engineering. It will become a role with a large pool of low-skilled coders who move forward with AI and a few specialists that will unblock those coders when stuck as well as address performance bottlenecks for production-scale. Keep reading to see why I believe this and the imminent threat it creates for engineers today. AGI is Grossly Oversold Let’s address the elephant in the room first. None of what I will say matters if AGI being around the corner is real. The problem is that it’s not. AGI is grossly oversold. We are in peak bubble territory and no one knows when the music will stop. What incentives do the large AI labs have? Their businesses are extremely capital-intensive. Therefore, they want you, the general public, and their investors to believe they are right around the corner of inventing AGI which will make them and their investors disgustingly rich. The stronger this belief, the longer they can keep the money flowing. Now, these foundational AI models will continue to improve in intelligence but not in their ability to be human-like. From first principles thinking: LLMs are just fancy predictive algorithms. The fundamental weaknesses that exist today in predictive algos will still exist in the future, even if that algorithm has 100x more compute or data. Have you noticed the goal post for AGI is constantly moving anyway? To believe “human endeavor is doomed” is to drink the Sam Altman Kool-Aid. We are far from the end o...