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Half of All Engineers The AI LLM boom seems to show no sign of slowing down. Each time I think we've reached some level of crazy use or predictions, things take another turn. I still find myself pinging back and forth between this will be amazingly good and horrifyingly bad. Sometimes on the same day. Today, I'm a little more down on AI. I was listening to Steve Yegge on the Pragmatic Engineer podcast, and they were discussing the curve of AI usage at companies. He points out that he's mad that Amazon let 16,000 engineers go and might let more go. He worries that companies might let 50% of their engineers go. Not necessarily because the top 50% will be more productive with AI than 100% of engineers without it. Rather the concern is that companies will get rid of half their salaries to pay for the AI tokens for the other half. Steve Yegge is an accomplished software engineer that has worked at Amazon and Google. Steve wrote Gastown and has been someone who not only is successful at producing code but also thinks a lot about how we produce more software. How coordinated and powerful are the new models? Can they really do a lot of software work that we do today? Steve thinks so, but to be fair, he's got a lot of experience and can architect and design software well, which means he can also guide AI LLMs and agents to write more code. He also thinks the latest models, like Opus 4.6, are way more capable that most people believe. I also caught this post on X about a paper predicting that AI might cause economic collapse as less knowledge workers are used in various tasks. This might happen faster than we can absorb those workers who are laid off in the name of AI back into the economy in other positions. It's a scary thought. The positive side of this, at least from me, is that so many organizations move slower, and so many people aren't extremely competent software engineers, so we'll get a lot of bad software written by non-technical people that doesn't scale. We'll have more database (and application) performance issues, and that will slow the use of YOLO, vibe coding. Plus plenty of companies just aren't implementing or looking to pay for lots of tokens. They'll just move slower and the world will change, but not anywhere near the pace that Steve or others think it will. We'll see, but let me know what you think. For a more positive spin, I've been reading Reshuffle, which is a little less depressing about the future. Steve Jones - SSC Editor Join the debate, and respond to today's editorial on the forums |
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