sankaritan

Agree on the point of that the shortage of tokens is causing a bit more responsible behavior with it comes to AI use, which is not necessarily a bad thing. The scarcity is a bit sad for solo-devs, but there's also hope this may encourage less slop and more thoughtful use of the tools while society adjusts.

There was an interesting discussion with creator of PI how even if LLMs are producing less errors than humans, they are producing them 10x faster and issues can compound a lot faster too. Introducing intentional breaks, even if by necessity, can help with that and not taking shortcuts that can be solved by throwing millions of tokens at any problem.

This can surely feel painful, and I feel occasional sense of dread too, but then realize than not a lot have changed for folks working in medium+ size companies. Domain knowledge and tech expertise were never the sole differentiators for me when it comes to working with or even hiring capable software engineers. There's so much more to software engineer's job and ability to produce code / designs was barely 30% of our jobs. There is this interdisciplinary skillset we had to hone, how to work with others, how to understand what they actually want, how to ship things safely and learn from our mistakes and data to understand what to build next. You said you maintain candid relationship with PMs and stakeholders so you're likely underselling the whole scope of work you do day to day beyond immediate technical delivery.

The time ahead may be rough given the transition period we're in but Software Engineering role (or whatever we will call it in 1-2 years) should not go away.

LLMs surely will be able to do most of the individual work Software Engineer needs to do, but blending them all together is a lot harder task. And once we have AI doing that too, well, I believe at that point vast majority of knowledge work can be replaced by AI too and this is not a Software Engineering problem anymore.

It's interesting. 95% of time you don't need the extra 5% rigor that frontier models provide to you compared to the 10-100x cheaper Chinese equivalents.

The remaining 5% of time you get a big boost for your high-reasoning problem solving needs and evade a lot of pain. Now, I just need to be able to predict accurately when I need this extra 5% and when not :)