"Engineering, product, and design are all merging into a 'builder' role"
Yeah... I'm not so sure. This feels like an oversimplification and podcast talking point. Reality is a lot more complex.
Even with 1000 "Member of Technical Staff" titles, someone still has to wake up and care 100x more about Product or Design than anyone else. It is their Main Thing™
That's not to say MTS titles are universally bad, but I think they're an example of this 'builder' talking point that's become bastardized.
AI and coding agents have made generating code easy and yet... you're in for a world of pain if non-engineers ship a bunch of slop and don't have great engineers to tame the complexity.
The SF hivemind has a tendency to overfit what works at startups for every company. And to be fair, sometimes this is true! Startups can be a leading indicator for how the industry is changing and often cause disruption.
However, it is going to be incredibly hard to disrupt the extremely human parts of corporate jobs. You really think there's going to be a PM who also does some engineering and design on the side at JPMorgan Chase?
This is true for the simple parts of most jobs, like people wanting to have ownership over something and do good work, move up a career ladder, support their family, get paid well, make an honest living...
And also the hard parts: internal politics, some critical business system that has a bus factor of 1 which has been running for 15 years and isn't documented anywhere because it's that guy's job security. The real world has a lot of this stuff.
It's easy to pontificate about all roles collapsing but it's actually really nice to have a specific person or team who is an expert in one thing that you can work with. I don't expect that to change. Further, I think AI disruption to knowledge work will take decades to play out because it is more fundamental to the human condition (e.g. sociological/organizational) than pure intelligence.
as much as i love clean code - anecdotally, every place that i have worked has had their codebase in some form of migration, with some areas of technical debt, etc
i do think there's likely a large correlation there in that the messy codebase is the company that survives
i think skills are a mistake and the wrong abstraction. i almost never want my agent auto invoking them and i have built custom tooling to "toggle" them on/off to prevent them from always being present in my context window.
the best "platform" teams spawn from building features in the product
you've hit all the roadblocks, time to clear them
the catch is you have to stay current - gotta keep dipping your toes into product work or you'll lose touch with where the friction is
Give your agent the Stripe projects CLI and have it:
- create a Cloudflare account
- start a subscription
- build and deploy apps
every day getting closer to starting a new business being literally a one-shot prompt
more soon! just the beginning…
want to get a deep dive on how we made artifacts, some novel use cases, and what we're cooking up for the future?
check out this convo + overview w/ @craigsdennis and @elithrar
https://t.co/czoovX8TK5
announcing artifacts - a versioned file system that speaks git
certainly the coolest thing i've ever built and i got to build it with some truly great people
fearless leader: @elithrar
zig/git nerd: @mattzcarey
storage goat: @thomas_ankcorn
https://t.co/BSjfaXTnvJ
You can now add voice to your agent using Agents SDK: https://t.co/bb29zIHvEt
Voice is just another input -- you can use the same WebSocket connection your Durable Object uses to transmit audio. So much fun working with @threepointone on this
today project Think is officially out!
we bet on agents that run non-stop, survive failures, cost nothing when idle, and enforce security through architecture
agents that any developer can build and deploy
agents that have sub-agents via Facets, Session API and full execution ladder wired in!
https://t.co/CwXvWHX2mE
Friday drop pre Agents Week — concurrent connection limits on Workers are now in practice a thing of the past
Before: With 6 concurrent outbound connections from one request, new connections from your Worker were blocked until an earlier connection fully completed
love seeing executor & the execution layer post in this video!
i'll have a lot more to share on executor this week, it's a bash replacement for your agents and feels like the future of how we give our agents access to tools - try it out! https://t.co/YqTmwo2dnx