The engineering career ladder is changing.
Old signal: โI can implement fast.โ
New signal: โI can create leverage.โ
That leverage increasingly comes from AI fluency, product sense, user understanding, communication, and judgment. This is how career engineers stay ahead of commoditization.
Career engineers don't need to become marketers to survive AI. But they do need to move up the stack.
From coding tickets to defining problems, guiding AI systems, shaping product decisions, and owning outcomes. That's where the new leverage is.
"SaaS is dead"
In reality, SaaS built for people who want to do it themselves will soon have to compete with companies like Anthropic and OpenAI.
But SaaS built for people who want it done for them? This is only beginning, and AI will give even more opportunities to these builders.
Key for all of the engineers out there: don't compete with agents on typing code.
Compete on judgment, integration, taste, problem selection, and the ability to turn ambiguity into working systems that people actually adopt.
Taste is only acquired once you've done the work manually enough times to understand quality.
Get into as many arenas as you can in order to gain enough experience to make good judgements.
@markbowley Itโs really odd. Several ai-related keywords have the exact same dropoff pattern. Seems more like a bug in the data or a change in tracking than an actual event.
Watching design twitter today feels like developer twitter in ~2023.
Half valid criticism of AI shortcomings, half coping with where this is headed.
Should bring the top-tier designers some comfort though. Itโs not the end just like itโs still not the end for engineers.
@tylertringas And just imagine how many SaaS platforms have already integrated Claude, thereby giving Anthropic mountains of data on what their users are trying to do and how they work ๐ซฃ
Opus 4.7 is definitely a step up in design. I'm not feeling much on the coding side though. Feels pretty much like 4.6 when it first came out, which I traded for 5.3 Codex.
The new bottleneck isn't writing code, it's reviewing it.
When agents generate 45 PRs in a day, taste becomes the most valuable engineering skill in the org.
@NoCodeDan Agreed. Iโm oblivious to the tokenized side of it, so canโt speak on that, but I think the number of people looking to โhireโ an agent instead of another SaaS subscription that still requires a human to run it is only increasing from here.