A senior engineer is not built from tutorials and autocomplete. They are built from outages. Failed migrations. Corrupted databases. Production calls where half the room panics and one exhausted engineer quietly starts narrowing the blast radius.
The early years of programming are supposed to be weirdly addictive. You write something stupid. It breaks. You stare at it. You swear. You change 1 line. It works for 3 seconds and you feel like a wizard.
Progress is made by the unreasonable person; AI merely ensures they now arrive with 6 vibe code sessions, 3 regressions "You're so right", and the confidence of a fool who has not read the error logs yet.
For 50 years, software engineering ran on code rationing. Writing code was expensive, so we rationed it carefully through roadmaps, RFCs, prioritization meetings, and scope reviews.
This created a role: the No Engineer. No, that won't scale. No, we don't have bandwidth. No, that's out of scope. No, we need a design doc first. The No Engineer was valuable for 50 years. Every "no" saved real money. Their judgment was the rationing system.
LLMs will be the end of code rationing. Code is cheap now. And while the No Engineer is explaining why something can't be done, the Yes Engineer has already shipped three versions of it.
If you're a Yes Engineer, the next decade is yours.
@JonathanRoss321 Progress is made by the unreasonable person; AI merely ensures they now arrive with 6 vibe code sessions, 3 regressions "You're so right", and the confidence of a fool who has not read the error logs yet.