The question: is software development becoming obsolete?
What Creates Competitive Edge in Software?
Building a moat
Technical barriers that prevent competitors from catching up
Example: The technical hurdles overcome when building Tuple
How moats protect market position
Domain knowledge
Deep understanding of the industry you operate in
Why specialized knowledge matters
The value of industry expertise
The Expanding Scope of Tech
Beyond backend/frontend/database
Maybe I’m naive because when you’re junior you don’t know the things you don’t know
The explosion of complexity in modern development
The growing tech stack
Cloud deployment considerations
Frontend framework proliferation
Different data stores and their trade-offs
Big data and analytics
Observability and monitoring
The accumulation problem
Tech was hard and complicated 10 years ago
None of that complexity has gone away
There’s just more on top of it
Gen-AI’s Impact on Junior Development
Gen-AI’s capabilities
Gave it a technical test and after a couple of back-and-forths it produced an output that I would be satisfied with as a submission from a junior engineer
The junior engineer question
If gen-AI can produce junior code, why bother hiring juniors?
The apprenticeship model in software development
The brain-drain problem
If there are no junior engineers entering the workforce, how do you replace senior engineers?
Is this a problem if gen-AI eventually does all the software work?
The Value Proposition Crisis
When AI can do everything
If gen-AI eventually can produce complete working software all by itself without the need for software engineers, where’s the value in the software?
The disposable software problem
Anyone can create bespoke solutions for their problems
Then throw them away the next week
The commoditization of software development
Is anything safe?
I don’t think ops/platform is safe with MCP on the horizon