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Believe the Checkbook

169 points by rg81

by RandallBrown

9 subcomments

> The bottleneck isn’t code production, it is judgment.
It always surprises me that this isn't obvious to everyone. If AI wrote 100% of the code that I do at work, I wouldn't get any more work done because writing the code is usually the easy part.

by zmj

3 subcomments

Do people reading this post not understand that this is the output of a prompt like 'analyze <event> with <perspective> arriving at <conclusion>'? Tighten up your epistemology if you're arguing with an author who isn't there.

by neilv

0 subcomment

> Treat AI as force multiplication for your highest-judgment people. The ones who can design systems, navigate ambiguity, shape strategy, and smell risk before it hits. They’ll use AI to move faster, explore more options, and harden their decisions with better data.
Clever pitch. Don't alienate all the people who've hitched their wagons to AI, but push valuing highly-skilled ICs as an actionable leadership insight.
Incidentally, strategy and risk management sound like a pay grade bump may be due.

by zamadatix

2 subcomments

Something about the way the article sets up the conversation nags at me a bit - even though it concludes with statements and reasoning I generally agree quite well with. It sets out what it wants to argue clearly at the start:
> Everyone’s heard the line: “AI will write all the code; engineering as you know it is finished... The Bun acquisition blows a hole in that story.”
But what the article actually discusses and demonstrates by the end of the article is how the aspects of engineering beyond writing the code is where the value in human engineers is at this point. To me that doesn't seem like an example of a revealed preference in this case. If you take it back to the first part of the original quote above it's just a different wording for AI being the code writer and engineering being different.
I think what the article really means to drive against is the claim/conclusion "because AI can generate lots of code we don't need any type of engineer" but that's just not what the quote they chose to set out against is saying. Without changing that claim the acquisition of Bun is not really a counterexample, Bun had just already changed the way they do engineering so the AI wrote the code and the engineers did the other things.

by conductr

1 subcomments

People speak in relative terms and hear in absolutes. Engineers will never completely vanish, but it will certainly feel like it if labor demand is reduced enough.
Technically, there’s still a horse buggy whip market, an abacus market, and probably anything else you think technology consumed. It’s just a minuscule fraction of what it once was.

by faxmeyourcode

1 subcomments

While I agree with the premise of the article, even if it was a bit shallow, this claim made at the beginning is also still true:
> Everyone’s heard the line: “AI will write all the code; engineering as you know it is finished.”
Software engineering pre-LLMs will never, ever come back. Lots of folks are not understanding that. What we're doing at the end of 2025 looks so much different than what we were doing at the end of 2024. Engineering as we knew it a year or two ago will never return.

by hapless

1 subcomments

by jollyllama

0 subcomment

"Believe the checkbook? Why do that when I can get pump-faked into strip-mining my engineering org?"- VPs everywhere

by TheCraiggers

1 subcomments

How do I know they didn't buy them just to make sure their competitors couldn't?

by drcode

3 subcomments

The bun acquisition is driven by current AI capabilities.
This argument requires us to believe that AI will just asymptote and not get materially better.
Five years from now, I don't think anyone will make these kinds of acquisitions anymore.

by barfoure

0 subcomment

I disagree with this article and what it attempts to do: frame the acquisition using a conjecture. The only thing to “believe” are the authors reasons - which are flimsy, because they are the very thing we need to be critical of.
I don’t know why the acquisition happened, or what the plans are. But it did happen, and for this we don’t have to suspend disbelief. I don’t doubt Anthropic has plans that they would rather not divulge. This isn’t a big stretch of imagination, either.
We will see how things play out, but people are definitely being displaced by AI software doing work, and people are productive with them. I know I am. The user count of Claude Code, Gemini and ChatGPT don’t lie, so let’s not kid ourselves.

by Rakshath_1

0 subcomment