Is This Sustainable?

This piece is really good:

> The cost of building has collapsed, but the cost of aligning organisationally has not. If anything, it's gone up. When three different teams can each produce a working solution to the same problem in the time it used to take to write a proposal, the bottleneck moves from engineering to coordination.

We're still figuring out how to productively use coding agents as individuals, the next challenge is figuring out how to productively use them within teams. Coding agents reduce one bottleneck - producing working code - but that just moves the bottlenecks elsewhere.

(Note I said "working" code and not "good" code, that's a whole other thing.)

> The result, in my case, is that I code more than I have in years. Three years ago I coded maybe once a fortnight, mostly throwaway PoCs to demonstrate concepts. Now I code most days of the week, in between other work.

This kind of senior engineering role really depends on the type/size of an org. I've had jobs like this on & off and generally don't stick around for long. There have always been high-impact hands-on-keyboard senior roles that involve coding most/every day..

> The other thing that gave way was thinking time. There's very little of it in my working day now. The productivity gains from AI got captured by output volume rather than output quality.

I actually see this externally from b2b vendors I am a client of. Companies that used to churn out X new products/month are now pushing 4X products but they all suck. The quantity over quality market is going to produce new opportunities for others.

> When I returned from five months of paternity leave in early 2024, the org needed someone at my level to lead GenAI work in developer experience and I was the available person. It wasn't a bet so much as an opportunity I recognised when it showed up. I took enough time to satisfy myself that this wave was different from previous hype cycles before I committed, but once I did, I had to drop most of the rest of my work on developer experience to make space for it. For a while I was the only engineer at any seniority dedicated to this, and the depth I built up happened by necessity as much as by design.

Followed by....

> Senior engineers in AI-forward orgs are doing more leveraged, more hands-on, more meeting-heavy work simultaneously, with the human-focused parts of the role paying for it. The build cost collapsed, the alignment cost rose, the thinking time disappeared, and the productivity gains got captured by output volume rather than output quality. I

What is the job of a senior/lead engineer if not to take the uninformed hype chasing of the senior business, and deploy it in a way that makes things better?

I can't help but feel this senior engineer is talking far too casually about how - under their watch as senior AI engineer chap - engineers spend more time on throwaway code, have less personal development/1-to-1s, and didn't improve code quality. They haven't even mentioned the added financial token cost.

The only thing standing in the way of greedy hype chasing CEOs and a post apocolyptic wasteland is engineers taking their crazy requests and not making the world worse, and it sounds like the author has failed here. I think it's very positive and frank to share their experience, but I'm surprised they don't seem to see their role in it.

When a long article is topped by an AI-generated image, it makes me wonder if I should bother reading. Did a human write this?

All right… So, the cost of technical work has gone down, surely leaving more time for things like coordination, leadership, and thinking on a more operational level, right?

> The cost of building has collapsed, but the cost of aligning organisationally has not. If anything, it's gone up.

…Oh.

> What gave way is the human-focused work. Mentoring is the clearest example. I have less time for 1-2-1s than I did three years ago, and that isn't an accident, it's a choice I've made under pressure.

Ohh.

> The other thing that gave way was thinking time. There's very little of it in my working day now.

Ohhh.

No, it isn't sustainable. There is a paper called "The AI Layoff Trap"[1], it says that it is a prisoner's dilemma and this is why this dude feels like he's in an arms race.

On the other front, people are saying that NVidia can't deliver stable drivers for like 15 months and they don't want to take software updates at all, they are more happy with last year's drivers.

I think this is a black swan event in the industry. A lot of people already suffered and more people will suffer still. Industry is going to change for sure, but probably not in a way that you would expect. Black swan simply doesn't work that way, it doesn't change industry in a good way, hence black swan.

[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/402969772_The_AI_La...

I think the implications for our industry are truly fundamental. I work at a large European IT company and am transforming existing product teams into an agentic SDLC pipeline. Typically, I need five days to set things up, followed by one or two days of coaching per month. We were able to reduce the size of the team I’m currently working with from 37 to 9 members. Colleagues whose sole value lies in their ability to code and who cannot contribute any domain expertise are no longer necessary. The impact on our profession and the next generation is terrible, revolutionary. In my opinion, no one is really giving much thought to what is currently happening socially within our industry. I try to write down my thoughts on this from time to time. https://ajagara.com/en/blog/agile-wie-wir-es-kennen-verschwi...

> ...this shift advantages people who can build fast with AI tools and disadvantages people who can't. The bias to action is genuine, but it isn't neutral. The engineers who've adopted these tools effectively get heard more often, get their proposals taken seriously more often, and shape direction more than those who haven't.

If only this was limited to engineers.

I'm seeing this applied to every role across organizations. The designer that gets heard is the one who can vibe code the best. Same with strategists, writers (seriously), and other people for whom "coding" is not remotely their expertise or function. This exponentially accelerates the "cost of aligning organisationally" when you have not only several eng groups but every single person in your team regardless of role proposing their own solutions, that as an engineer it is now your responsibility to babysit (or as we are terming it, "harden").

Meanwhile, the quality of creative work suffers because instead of working in a surface that's designed for their trade and process (e.g. Figma) they jump straight to Claude or Cursor or v0 or whatever, where they're bounded by (and graded on) their ability to manipulate a bot, rather than their actual skillset.