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Netlify CTO in 6-18 months: that vibe project that caused me to say writing code is no longer the job got so unmaintainable that I hired a team of 3 to take it over. They're rewriting it by hand because tokens are too expensive now. Nobody could have seen this coming
Being a Chief Technology Officer is no longer the job. We now need an end-to-end AI orchestrator for the corporation in the Chief Agentic Officer role. Dana Lawson is now obsolete and must be let go.
Looking at Dana Lawson's career on linked in, it looks like they never spent time being an actual developer. Seems fitting that a completely out of touch elite in the US would make such statements.
"Out of touch elite"? a MAGA-like populism view in a place where MAGA is (rightly) looked down on.
Netlify CTO in 6-18 months: that vibe project that caused me to say writing code is no longer the job got so unmaintainable that I hired a team of 3 to take it over. They're rewriting it by hand because tokens are too expensive now. Nobody could have seen this coming
> I hired a team of 3 to take it over There are large areas of software where the quality of code is measured by the mental model of its human maintainers. For these areas, LLMs are a net negative because their use degrades the mental model of the human maintainers.
Even just reading the code, their ability to ingest colossal amounts & answer questions in incredibly useful. Once you hook them up to observability, DAP (debug anything protocol), a repl, devtools... their ability to augment and accelerate practitioners is amazing.
There can be a lot of oral history that is lost, for sure, that helps illuminate why things are built the way they are, what the intent was. I've always favored a written culture, that has artifacts that help explain the past. Engineers move projects, move companies: trusting the mental model to live in people's heads has a lot of risk and downsides to it.
We’ve been trying to do the hands off autoremediated, guardrails on code quality platform for a while now. It turns out it’s really hard.
A lot of the AI hyping sounds like the cloud and serverless hyping. I remember I had a VP of engineering at a company a while ago I got into a fight with about cloud. Their argument was that cloud economics were such that on-premise was dead dead. My argument was that it could still be considered an engineering question. And while im not saying on-prem is winning; It’s not a forgone conclusion as 37signals has discovered.
Looking at Dana Lawson's career on linked in, it looks like they never spent time being an actual developer. Seems fitting that a completely out of touch elite in the US would make such statements.
Petty personal attack. A technical manager who manages developers should know very well the job of their reports. "Out of touch elite"? a MAGA-like populism view in a place where MAGA is (rightly) looked down on.
I was managed by a fair share of those that had absolutely no fucking idea of how I did my job.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I was younger I used to assume that CTO was like the ultimate experienced engineer, and most every CTO I've dealt with in 25 years has been a needle scratch for that assumption.
A CTO once asked me: Why do we have a test and staging environment? Could we propose removing them as cost savings initiative? During a time when cost savings where the number 1 priority. What a tiring world.
Being a Chief Technology Officer is no longer the job. We now need an end-to-end AI orchestrator for the corporation in the Chief Agentic Officer role. Dana Lawson is now obsolete and must be let go.
But what do you think about her opinion? Is writing code still a job of developers going forward? and why?
In the agile spirit of “working software over comprehensive documentation” I do think the future of software engineering is writing code. Speaking through code is not a philosophy that’s going away any time soon imo. If anything, code is that much more important than it was before.