Michael Gill

do more side quests 🧙🌲
cto, ai consultant, eng, indie game dev

[Michael Gill @gill_works]

🎯 https://t.co/Xwcyl2YYNl

[Klaas @forgebitz]

if you are in saas, pivot to service

service as a software

report -> action

people want things to be solved not just reported

[Michael Gill @gill_works]

The engineering career ladder is changing.

Old signal: “I can implement fast.”
New signal: “I can create leverage.”

That leverage increasingly comes from AI fluency, product sense, user understanding, communication, and judgment. This is how career engineers stay ahead of commoditization.

[Michael Gill @gill_works]

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.

[Michael Gill @gill_works]

"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.

[Michael Gill @gill_works]

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.

[Michael Gill @gill_works]

@markbowley What’s your best advice for being on here today?

[Michael Gill @gill_works]

Finally ready to make content again, it's been a while.

[Michael Gill @gill_works]

Engineers don't need to become marketers. But engineers should learn enough marketing to be able to design, supervise, and improve marketing systems.

[Michael Gill @gill_works]

Is "autonomous SaaS" the best way to describe where we're actually headed?

[Michael Gill @gill_works]

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.

[Michael Gill @gill_works]

@benblumenrose 100% agree. I think this is more of an on-ramp for engineers who need to up-skill than anything else tbh 🤷‍♂️

[Michael Gill @gill_works]

@markbowley It’s 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.

[Michael Gill @gill_works]

What exactly happened here?

[Michael Gill @gill_works]

@markbowley Just having something to say again I guess. Feels like a pivotal moment for everyone from career eng’s to indie hacker/no-coders.

[Michael Gill @gill_works]

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. It’s not the end just like it’s still not the end for engineers.

[Michael Gill @gill_works]

@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 🫣

[Michael Gill @gill_works]

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.

[ry @rywalker]

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.

[Michael Gill @gill_works]

@NoCodeDan Agreed. I’m oblivious to the tokenized side of it, so can’t speak on that, but I think the number of people looking to “hire” an agent instead of another SaaS subscription that still requires a human to run it is only increasing from here.

[Michael Gill @gill_works]

I silently launched a couple of zero-human companies. There's gold in them hills.

[Michael Gill @gill_works]

@NoCodeDan Strictly B2B services, more like vertical agents in reality