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.
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).
"Lol", do you think in lols or do you ever sit and consider something more deeply? Or maybe you think adding a lol makes the other side's argument ridiculous and yours stronger?
Skipping the lols, here's the answer to your question: doesn't matter if developers "are already commodities" to some degree.
First, because that degree is small, else developers wouldn't command such high salaries relative to other trades. So they might be commoditized compared to surgeons, but not at all compared to most office or blue collar trades.
Second, even if they are commoditized to some degree, the argument is that AI will bring further commodification. Not that it will introduce the first and foremost case of commodification in the developing world.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
What could happen is a reduction in the amount of programs used, with a smaller set of more sophisticated programs doing more work. This maps to what we saw pre-industrial revolution: lots of small family operations doing menial manufacturing work (woodworking, textiles, cooking). This got replaced by large factories. A smaller amount of companies producing the a larger volume of goods. With AI, a smaller group of engineers could handle more local complexity, thus allowing more sophisticated, general purpose software to be created, deleting the sea of small pieces of software we have today.
Will this means many will be jobless? No, they would do other things. They'd be using this software to support society, operating at a high level. Think low-code, but incredibly complex stuff; just not raw code anymore. Instead of making circuit boards out of descrete components, you now slap a few ICs on a board with some supporting passives and the work is then all done in software. Engineers use more high-level components rather then welding and machinijng things from scratch; you buy T-slot profiles and bolts rather than casting and milling steel from billets.
So the job of programmer may disappear simmilar to how we don't have bakers anymore, baking is done in factories, operated by a small staff. Current-day programmers will then increasingly shift to whatever high-level constructs we'll come up with, this high level work will be supported by the base infrastructure that those who still touch raw code will build.
From what I have observed in my team, the opposite is occurring. Everyone is just making their own software because the barriers are so low. There is a lot less sharing and coordination going on, and the bottleneck moved to having the hardware available to run it all, so now we’re spending a lot more money on compute.
Are we sure Claude Scale™ won’t appear next month? A specialist agent that turns your vibe coded mess into a production grade scaled solution on their infrastructure.
Expect anthropic to want to capture more of the supply chain over time
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.
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.
Yeah the whole tech world did a weird side quest over the past 20 or so years huffing its own farts due to how the internet/adtech/etc sucked all the air out of everything else tech related. And the economy as a whole.
It also coincided with the hollowing out and offshoring of practically all US industrial and manufacturing capability.
I will be very happy if the result of AI means we go back to how things should actually be - where technology/IT is used to support real world things and acts as a backstage enabler to get shit done. Not the main event.
I often said since the early 00’s my dream would be to have made enough money in the insanely stupid “tech for tech sake” world to go back to just being one of a few “IT guys” supporting a factory and keeping the machines running. These jobs of course exist, but due to tech salaries very few small manufacturing businesses could support hiring such a person.
There is now a generation or two of technologists who don’t understand that the job isn’t to learn the latest hot web framework or yammer on about best practices or whatever. It’s to support a business in shipping actual products to customers.
I love it too. It's a really positive aspect of AI. And it's NOT because it "takes jobs away from developers". In this case, there was NO (professional/career) developer and NO software product focused on what this guy did.
We've long made fun of excel-jockeys getting carried away with VBA, but they came into being because engaging with turgid and expensive software companies to do important but small jobs was such a pain in the ass. This is the start of a new era, and while I am sure we're going to see some wild fiascos, it is a move in the right direction for people that need to solve problems with computers.
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.
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.
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…
Both agencies used pencils, but they were problematic because the graphite could break off / float around / cause shorts.
The space pen was developed by Fisher independently of NASA. NASA bought 400 of them for $2.39 each. The Roscosmos later bought 100 for the same price.
Firstly, pencils in space pose serious risks. Pencils produce dust, graphite dust is conductive, and won't settle down in microgravity. They were used early on, but both space agencies phased them out when they realized the risks. After that, they first moved to grease pencils, which kind of suck for normal writing.
NASA didn't research how to make pens that work in space, an American private company did it on their own initiative and money. Then they sold pens to NASA for cheap, and marketed the same pens to people not in space for a lot of money and made a nice profit.
Today, both Roscosmos and NASA use the same pens, bought from Fisher.
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.
I've noticed even experienced engineers have started overestimating how long things would take to build without AI. Believe it or not we coded before AI and not everything took years all the time.
We’ve all worked on projects where it took months to get requirements from the business. Sometimes to see the project cancelled after months of sitting around waiting for them to decide on things.
Coding has never been the roadblock in software. Indeed don’t we experience this now with ai? Vibe code a basics idea then discover the things we didn’t consider. Try to vibe that and the code base quickly gets out of hand. Then we all discover “spec driven development” SDD and in turn discover thinking of specifying everything our selves is an even bigger of PITA?
"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.
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.
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
I also caught this but then figured 10m may not be the typical drawing time. 10m -> 1m means 10x faster. 5m = 300s alas 3s/drawing. So maybe it only tool 30s/drawing previously. (Unlikely.)
But even then, it also says 5m can save days of work. Days is minimum 2days, or 16h, or 960s. That’s not 10x faster as previously stated, but 192x faster.
There is no way I’d trust AI to do a takeoff of construction plans. I estimate and run electrical work for a living. A single mistake can erase your entire profit margin or cause you to lose money, ask me how I know.
I sure hope their fitters know to double check the calculations, industrial process piping failures kill people. If this AI takeoff process gets the pipe size or weld wrong at an ethanol plant and the fitters don’t catch it, things get explosive.
Industrial process piping is not a CRUD app, mistakes actually matter when they can result in the death of a human. Programmers are way too cavalier about pushing AI because things like CRUD apps are super low stakes, nobody’s life is on the line.
I read through the comments and apparently nobody understands how dangerous a high pressure industrial process piping system is if the pipe and welds are not up to spec.
These days I am being extra careful and double checking the engineered drawings I bid for mistakes, AI slop is going to infect everything.
I had a similar “oh wow this has normalised fast” a few weeks back when someone was like “oh it just takes all the human written recipe data and normalises it?” and I smiled at the “just”. Literally a nightmare problem only a few short years ago.
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.
Skipping the lols, here's the answer to your question: doesn't matter if developers "are already commodities" to some degree.
First, because that degree is small, else developers wouldn't command such high salaries relative to other trades. So they might be commoditized compared to surgeons, but not at all compared to most office or blue collar trades.
Second, even if they are commoditized to some degree, the argument is that AI will bring further commodification. Not that it will introduce the first and foremost case of commodification in the developing world.
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.
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.
Will this means many will be jobless? No, they would do other things. They'd be using this software to support society, operating at a high level. Think low-code, but incredibly complex stuff; just not raw code anymore. Instead of making circuit boards out of descrete components, you now slap a few ICs on a board with some supporting passives and the work is then all done in software. Engineers use more high-level components rather then welding and machinijng things from scratch; you buy T-slot profiles and bolts rather than casting and milling steel from billets.
So the job of programmer may disappear simmilar to how we don't have bakers anymore, baking is done in factories, operated by a small staff. Current-day programmers will then increasingly shift to whatever high-level constructs we'll come up with, this high level work will be supported by the base infrastructure that those who still touch raw code will build.
Expect anthropic to want to capture more of the supply chain over time
I find that scalability is usually overblown because computers are fast now, which is not to say you shouldn't make it run fast on one computer.
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.
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.
It also coincided with the hollowing out and offshoring of practically all US industrial and manufacturing capability.
I will be very happy if the result of AI means we go back to how things should actually be - where technology/IT is used to support real world things and acts as a backstage enabler to get shit done. Not the main event.
I often said since the early 00’s my dream would be to have made enough money in the insanely stupid “tech for tech sake” world to go back to just being one of a few “IT guys” supporting a factory and keeping the machines running. These jobs of course exist, but due to tech salaries very few small manufacturing businesses could support hiring such a person.
There is now a generation or two of technologists who don’t understand that the job isn’t to learn the latest hot web framework or yammer on about best practices or whatever. It’s to support a business in shipping actual products to customers.
We've long made fun of excel-jockeys getting carried away with VBA, but they came into being because engaging with turgid and expensive software companies to do important but small jobs was such a pain in the ass. This is the start of a new era, and while I am sure we're going to see some wild fiascos, it is a move in the right direction for people that need to solve problems with computers.
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.
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.
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…
Both agencies used pencils, but they were problematic because the graphite could break off / float around / cause shorts.
The space pen was developed by Fisher independently of NASA. NASA bought 400 of them for $2.39 each. The Roscosmos later bought 100 for the same price.
Firstly, pencils in space pose serious risks. Pencils produce dust, graphite dust is conductive, and won't settle down in microgravity. They were used early on, but both space agencies phased them out when they realized the risks. After that, they first moved to grease pencils, which kind of suck for normal writing.
NASA didn't research how to make pens that work in space, an American private company did it on their own initiative and money. Then they sold pens to NASA for cheap, and marketed the same pens to people not in space for a lot of money and made a nice profit.
Today, both Roscosmos and NASA use the same pens, bought from Fisher.
> 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.
Coding has never been the roadblock in software. Indeed don’t we experience this now with ai? Vibe code a basics idea then discover the things we didn’t consider. Try to vibe that and the code base quickly gets out of hand. Then we all discover “spec driven development” SDD and in turn discover thinking of specifying everything our selves is an even bigger of PITA?
People in the trades have a ruthless pragmatism that SV has forgotten.
https://www.slater.dev/2025/08/oil-spills-can-create-jobs/
bullshit story always leave something like this.
But even then, it also says 5m can save days of work. Days is minimum 2days, or 16h, or 960s. That’s not 10x faster as previously stated, but 192x faster.
So yeah, it doesn’t add up.
I sure hope their fitters know to double check the calculations, industrial process piping failures kill people. If this AI takeoff process gets the pipe size or weld wrong at an ethanol plant and the fitters don’t catch it, things get explosive.
Industrial process piping is not a CRUD app, mistakes actually matter when they can result in the death of a human. Programmers are way too cavalier about pushing AI because things like CRUD apps are super low stakes, nobody’s life is on the line.
I read through the comments and apparently nobody understands how dangerous a high pressure industrial process piping system is if the pipe and welds are not up to spec.
These days I am being extra careful and double checking the engineered drawings I bid for mistakes, AI slop is going to infect everything.
But before LLMs, computers couldn't understand that phrase. Now they can.