The guy from the story, it’s just another developer starting from a different trade, pretty normal across our history, musicians, lawyers that discovered that they were good at computers. The conclusion is flawed, not anyone can endure what this person did, sit at a terminal, going back and forward until something is finished. That’s what a SW dev does. My conclusion, many more people will discover that they are good at software, not everybody, but some of them will discover this new powers, thanks to a new lower barrier provided by LLM.
Let's take the metaphor of writing. Would we say this guy is just a writer who started from another trade? No. Writing is something that used to require experts (scribes) and that now anyone can do and is just a normal part of doing any work.
Developers are scribes - we have sacred knowledge that is now being democratized because everyone can do it due to good enough tools. As a result, we won't be needed much going forward.
> Developers are scribes - we have sacred knowledge that is now being democratized because everyone can do it due to good enough tools. As a result, we won't be needed much going forward.
The ability to solve problems is what’s important. Not your ability to remember things or to hold sacred knowledge.
This. Software development probably requires some of the least boilerplate memorization in all of STEM. Deductive reasoning and imagination are far more important than being flexing that you’ve committed quicksort to memory.
Is it knowing how to write a regex without a reference, or maybe implementing a distributed ec postgres cluster using bash, ooh how about writing a minimum cnn in C for edge classification ooohhh wooowee…
Ever worked construction? There’s hammer swingers that need one swing per nail and never miss. Or plasterers that make chalk look like marble. How about a high voltage lineman that can switch a 20kv oil-cooled transformer in less than 15 minutes to get the power to the school back on
No different from any tradesman - we’re not special
Writing is a tool, a technology. Much like hammers or saws, which are also commodified. And even though anyone can go buy a saw, not everyone is a carpenter.
It means specialization. When people with no software development experience but lots of experience in some other domain have the ability to create software that fits their individual needs, that's a recipe for an explosion in highly specialized tooling.
Lol no it doesn't you literally have it backwards - think about the trades, specifically construction, as low barrier to entry jobs and consider that houses/buildings are all different (not commodities).
Both can be true in homes being unique while also functionally being like commodities. Whether a home or a spec home or tract home the pricing is based similarly to sports stats and no matter how one-of-a-kind a home is a mortgage on such a home can then be packaged with a bunch of other homes into a bond where bond investors will look at the stats of the combined homes and who the borrowers are.
I've more or less accepted this, and I think my future is in making software more resilient, secure, and fault tolerant. These people will likely want to scale these solutions up, tie different solutions together, and generally make their lives increasingly difficult. Often without realizing it.
My experience is that Claude starts to make quite a mess in this context, and it'll often cause as many problems as it solves unless you have the technical and domain knowledge to redirect and correct it frequently. Perhaps training will solve this, and it'll certainly get better, but I'm not sure how far it'll go and how fast.
My gut feeling is that software will only become more ambitious and interface with hardware and other systems in increasingly sophisticated ways. Things that seemed infeasible due to time and cost constraints will be on the table. It'll reveal new challenges, I think. I have a feeling it'll be humans with deep technical skills who are at the forefront of solving those challenges for a while yet.
Not claiming I have the skills and to be one of those people, just that it's where I'm pushing my career at the moment.
I'm stoked that people like this have the resources and newfound capabilities to create solutions like this. The reality is that previously, many people have been underserved due to the economics of software and inherent risks of trying things like this as a smaller business owner. So this is great. We can find more ways that software can be valuable, and people can do their jobs better in ways they've literally only imagined before. It's great.
I absolutely love this, because to me, this is what software development should be about, solving actual problems and providing faster calculations, improving the workflow for people.
It does strike me as a little odd that they didn't hire a developer earlier and got the code written. Sitting back and waiting for someone to drop by and present a solution is a little naive, but it's also the world we built in the IT industry over the past 20 years. When I started my first job, we frequently had customers ask for bespoke solution, most of which was small one week to a few months of work. Multiple co-workers in the mid 2000s has side businesses, where they did contract development, most of which was these types of small one off solutions. Most of the software companies, in my area, that did these types of jobs are all gone now.
If AI accidentally created an environment where people can once again solve small programming problems on their own and massively improve the workflows I'm all for it. Serves the industry right for abandoning these customers.
I think there are many moats that non-experts won't attempt to cross even with AI assistance.
For example, we've built in a lot of complexity to areas like authentication. And for good reason. It's like electrical code. I'd pay good money to watch a muggle attempt to configure OIDC infrastructure. Even with the AI explaining everything to you, it's too much information to digest at once. You'd need an entire afternoon just to wrap your head around the idea of asymmetric cryptography. That's a lot of time not spent doing the thing your business is actually about.
Trades / SWE overlap is interesting as I think they are analogous to each other.
I went to college with a lot of actual engineers - mechanical, electrical, chemical, etc. In those fields you are designing products and then engineering processes to output a cog of some sort (drug, car, GPU, iPhone, etc) in the thousands to millions.
In our fields as SWEs, a lot of our job it's like the trades going into a house to install HVAC, fix a burst pipe, upgrade a circuit breaker, replace a furnace, etc. No two setups are exactly alike, no requirements are exactly alike, etc.
Even in the age of LLMs I think the industry remains more artisanal than engineering. And that's not a knock on us, I think it's because what we do is essentially automate business processes.. and no two businesses are alike. I don't think LLMs replace the role, it just makes parts of our job faster. The mindset of how you automate something doesn't generally exist in the minds of people who want the automation.
For better or for worse, when everyone is a "potential software founder" nobody is because your potential customers can just use AI the same way you did.
It's a really interesting case study, but the summary seems to lean into the AI hype to an extent that borders on lying.
> His fabrication shop uses it daily, and he built the entire thing in 8 weeks. During those 8 weeks he also had to learn everything about Claude Code, the terminal, VS Code, everything.
I don't see how he can give this summary with a straight face after posting the interview that CLEARLY contradicts it.
In the interview the engineer says "When Claud Code came out almost a year ago, I started dabbling with web based tools ..." and "When it first came out I had so many ideas and tried all these different things", so he had clearly already used extensively it for a year. I would also guess the engineer was somewhat technically minded from the get-go, since he claims he was "really good with excel" before starting with Claude Code, but that is beside the point.
The interviewer later asks "How much of those 8 weeks was learning Claude Code versus actually building the thing?", and the interviewee answers "Well, I started Claude Code when it first came out so the learning curve has really gone down for me now..." and then trails off to a different subject. Which further confirms that the summary in the post is false.
It really seems like the engineer has spent the year prior learning Claude Code and then spent 8 weeks on solely building this specific application.
The interviewer also claims "This would normally have taken a developer a year to build", which seems really unsubstantiated. It's of course hard to judge without all the details, but looking at the short demo in the video, 8 weeks of regular development time from a somewhat experienced developer doesn't seem too far fetched if the objective is "don't make it pretty, just make it work".
As I said, it's a really interesting case study about a paradigm shift in how software is developed, and it's clear this app would never have existed without Claude Code. So I don't really see the need for the blatant lying.
Here's what I find difficult to reconcile with my own experience. I've been using Codex in anger for the past 2 months or so (with gpt5.3-codex and then gpt5.4) on projects of different complexity. It is quite good at debugging, but the (non-trivial) code it produces is really bad. And I don't mean bad stylistically, but bad in the sense that Codex clearly won't be able to maintain it for long (which is how Anthropic's C compiler experiment failed) because it uses an approach of "success at all costs" where it always prefers fixes that treat the symptom rather than going back and rethinking the architecture as features are added.
So the options are: 1. the program involved here is really trivial, 2. it hasn't evolved long enough for the agent to fail at evolution, or 3. others are not seeing what I'm seeing.
"Mechanical engineer uses code to improve engineering process". Okay, this has been going on forever. Other engineering disciplines and various fields using software to solve problems. Programming doesn't exist in a vacuum of theory.
I feel both great and awful about this. For over a decade I’ve said that nearly anyone that uses a computer could benefit from some programming understanding. A little bit can go a long way to solving problems like this. Problems that collectively slow down and block the ambitions of a huge number of people worldwide.
But instead we’ve found a way to circumvent the process. Losing the understanding of your own problem and the new ideas that come off the back of it.
I’m reminded of the story that NASA had a research project to make pens that would work in space, and Roscosmos just used pencils. I always thought NASA came off worse in that anecdote, but I wonder what they learnt while making the pen…
Software development usability has always been measured in mean time before black-box failure: something misbehaves that the person can't fix or understand.
LLM's shorten that time for every application and every user, but particularly for users from professions that haven't built modeling or debugging skills because they rely on physical reality - like pipes fitting or process supervision - to weed out non-performers.
Hiring for LLM-enhanced work should focus on debugging skills in unknown situations.
For decades, employees have been developing tools using whatever was available to them, and in most cases, this was limited to Excel macros.
AI provides access to much better tools for testing and quickly experimenting with new ideas.
The only ones who should be worried are companies that charge millions for four junior developers and an agile coach, and deliver more PowerPoints than code (I’m looking at you, Capgemini).
I think it's awesome that AI is enabling this. I think the the future of software engineering is in helping make this kind of thing resilient and removing the fragility that AI generated code always seems to inject
As part of my "well shit what's next" arc I've been checking out machine shops in my area. By and large they are dumb manual 30 year contracts or highly automated job shops..
And the owners of those job shops aim for 3 shifts per worker via automation, and mash their own software with AI already. They are ruthless at cost cutting and automation and AI tools are perfect for them.
Unfortunately the vibe I get talking to them is essentially a triumphant "why would I need you, I have AI" or "yeah you're screwed".
I can't blame them for being served expensive barely functional crap SaaS or ERP software for ages, but I was not expecting to be viewed as part of the problem coming from a robotics, automation, and optimization background myself. It's just all a block of overpaid swindlers to them.
People like this will create a net increase in software jobs. Once his software makes enough money so he doesn't have to sit in front of a computer, he will employ someone. It will initially be a gig fixing slop. https://www.slater.dev/2025/09/about-that-gig-fixing-vibe-co...
People in the trades have a ruthless pragmatism that SV has forgotten.
94 comments
Developers are scribes - we have sacred knowledge that is now being democratized because everyone can do it due to good enough tools. As a result, we won't be needed much going forward.
> Developers are scribes - we have sacred knowledge that is now being democratized because everyone can do it due to good enough tools. As a result, we won't be needed much going forward.
The ability to solve problems is what’s important. Not your ability to remember things or to hold sacred knowledge.
Is it knowing how to write a regex without a reference, or maybe implementing a distributed ec postgres cluster using bash, ooh how about writing a minimum cnn in C for edge classification ooohhh wooowee…
Ever worked construction? There’s hammer swingers that need one swing per nail and never miss. Or plasterers that make chalk look like marble. How about a high voltage lineman that can switch a 20kv oil-cooled transformer in less than 15 minutes to get the power to the school back on
No different from any tradesman - we’re not special
> Writing is a tool, a technology.
Like paint, it can be used as a tool, to paint your house, or as a craft and artform, to paint the Rouen Cathedral.
>
thanks to a new lower barrier provided by LLM.New lower barrier means commodification.
Houses/buildings are each isolated physical structures.
Software is trivially and instantly replicated, and the same software can serve millions.
Also, even in your example you're just the commodified roofer or construction worker. Not the non-commodified house.
> consider that houses/building are all different (not commodities)
The vast majority of US housing construction is tract housing, which is a commodity. In the EU, flats, which are also commodities.
https://www.nahb.org/blog/2025/08/custom-home-building-grows...
My experience is that Claude starts to make quite a mess in this context, and it'll often cause as many problems as it solves unless you have the technical and domain knowledge to redirect and correct it frequently. Perhaps training will solve this, and it'll certainly get better, but I'm not sure how far it'll go and how fast.
My gut feeling is that software will only become more ambitious and interface with hardware and other systems in increasingly sophisticated ways. Things that seemed infeasible due to time and cost constraints will be on the table. It'll reveal new challenges, I think. I have a feeling it'll be humans with deep technical skills who are at the forefront of solving those challenges for a while yet.
Not claiming I have the skills and to be one of those people, just that it's where I'm pushing my career at the moment.
I'm stoked that people like this have the resources and newfound capabilities to create solutions like this. The reality is that previously, many people have been underserved due to the economics of software and inherent risks of trying things like this as a smaller business owner. So this is great. We can find more ways that software can be valuable, and people can do their jobs better in ways they've literally only imagined before. It's great.
It does strike me as a little odd that they didn't hire a developer earlier and got the code written. Sitting back and waiting for someone to drop by and present a solution is a little naive, but it's also the world we built in the IT industry over the past 20 years. When I started my first job, we frequently had customers ask for bespoke solution, most of which was small one week to a few months of work. Multiple co-workers in the mid 2000s has side businesses, where they did contract development, most of which was these types of small one off solutions. Most of the software companies, in my area, that did these types of jobs are all gone now.
If AI accidentally created an environment where people can once again solve small programming problems on their own and massively improve the workflows I'm all for it. Serves the industry right for abandoning these customers.
For example, we've built in a lot of complexity to areas like authentication. And for good reason. It's like electrical code. I'd pay good money to watch a muggle attempt to configure OIDC infrastructure. Even with the AI explaining everything to you, it's too much information to digest at once. You'd need an entire afternoon just to wrap your head around the idea of asymmetric cryptography. That's a lot of time not spent doing the thing your business is actually about.
I went to college with a lot of actual engineers - mechanical, electrical, chemical, etc. In those fields you are designing products and then engineering processes to output a cog of some sort (drug, car, GPU, iPhone, etc) in the thousands to millions.
In our fields as SWEs, a lot of our job it's like the trades going into a house to install HVAC, fix a burst pipe, upgrade a circuit breaker, replace a furnace, etc. No two setups are exactly alike, no requirements are exactly alike, etc.
Even in the age of LLMs I think the industry remains more artisanal than engineering. And that's not a knock on us, I think it's because what we do is essentially automate business processes.. and no two businesses are alike. I don't think LLMs replace the role, it just makes parts of our job faster. The mindset of how you automate something doesn't generally exist in the minds of people who want the automation.
> His fabrication shop uses it daily, and he built the entire thing in 8 weeks. During those 8 weeks he also had to learn everything about Claude Code, the terminal, VS Code, everything.
I don't see how he can give this summary with a straight face after posting the interview that CLEARLY contradicts it.
In the interview the engineer says "When Claud Code came out almost a year ago, I started dabbling with web based tools ..." and "When it first came out I had so many ideas and tried all these different things", so he had clearly already used extensively it for a year. I would also guess the engineer was somewhat technically minded from the get-go, since he claims he was "really good with excel" before starting with Claude Code, but that is beside the point.
The interviewer later asks "How much of those 8 weeks was learning Claude Code versus actually building the thing?", and the interviewee answers "Well, I started Claude Code when it first came out so the learning curve has really gone down for me now..." and then trails off to a different subject. Which further confirms that the summary in the post is false.
It really seems like the engineer has spent the year prior learning Claude Code and then spent 8 weeks on solely building this specific application.
The interviewer also claims "This would normally have taken a developer a year to build", which seems really unsubstantiated. It's of course hard to judge without all the details, but looking at the short demo in the video, 8 weeks of regular development time from a somewhat experienced developer doesn't seem too far fetched if the objective is "don't make it pretty, just make it work".
As I said, it's a really interesting case study about a paradigm shift in how software is developed, and it's clear this app would never have existed without Claude Code. So I don't really see the need for the blatant lying.
So the options are: 1. the program involved here is really trivial, 2. it hasn't evolved long enough for the agent to fail at evolution, or 3. others are not seeing what I'm seeing.
Most engineers have to take at least one programming class in college.
But instead we’ve found a way to circumvent the process. Losing the understanding of your own problem and the new ideas that come off the back of it.
I’m reminded of the story that NASA had a research project to make pens that would work in space, and Roscosmos just used pencils. I always thought NASA came off worse in that anecdote, but I wonder what they learnt while making the pen…
LLM's shorten that time for every application and every user, but particularly for users from professions that haven't built modeling or debugging skills because they rely on physical reality - like pipes fitting or process supervision - to weed out non-performers.
Hiring for LLM-enhanced work should focus on debugging skills in unknown situations.
AI provides access to much better tools for testing and quickly experimenting with new ideas.
The only ones who should be worried are companies that charge millions for four junior developers and an agile coach, and deliver more PowerPoints than code (I’m looking at you, Capgemini).
Tbh this is nothing new; we knew technical people with Claude code would be able to program well enough that tbey would be business developers.
And the owners of those job shops aim for 3 shifts per worker via automation, and mash their own software with AI already. They are ruthless at cost cutting and automation and AI tools are perfect for them.
Unfortunately the vibe I get talking to them is essentially a triumphant "why would I need you, I have AI" or "yeah you're screwed".
I can't blame them for being served expensive barely functional crap SaaS or ERP software for ages, but I was not expecting to be viewed as part of the problem coming from a robotics, automation, and optimization background myself. It's just all a block of overpaid swindlers to them.
People in the trades have a ruthless pragmatism that SV has forgotten.
https://www.slater.dev/2025/08/oil-spills-can-create-jobs/
>10 minutes per drawing now takes 60 seconds. It can do 100 drawings in five minutes
bullshit story always leave something like this.