Software Engineering

“If you're studying software engineering, I think you're going to be entering a market that's very uncertain in four years time.”

“Some pieces of our craft are actually getting abstracted by models being able to do it really effectively, maybe better than individuals can. And your craft moves from being able to do that very specific task you did in the past to Now applying it to some othe…”

“You're not going to replace human with AI as much as you're going to build a new system for developing software and humans are going to build that new system alongside AI. And that new system is going to look very unfamiliar, and so it's not so much a one-to-o…”

“I think it is hard these days to take a bet that is multi-year at this point. Maybe not on the, I would say, Adams-level infrastructure, because those do still take a while, but if it's in, you know, in, in product, in software, because I don't know that it ne…”

“If I'm writing a program, I'll like, whatever, I'll use a cloud database, I'll use storage, I'll use networking, you know, whatever it is, but like correctness and logic for the program is under the programmer's control. Maybe I'll use a third party library. B…”

“Some jobs that are going to get displaced, and they already are, software engineering, customer service.”

“Now, I think the majority of engineering historically has not been really systems thinking based. You know, it's been a little bit more execution oriented, but if you think about like the hardest engineering, like, Hey, I'm trying to design like what this is g…”

“And for researchers, I suspect that although the current workflow of researcher Is it going to very much be automated? There will be new things in the spirit of research in the same way that there's new things in the spirit of software engineering, even though…”

“I think, you know, software engineering has been really transformed by AI. I think there's areas like biology, life sciences. These are all things that we're just kind of at like the foot of the exponential on. Like, maybe software engineering were on the expo…”

“So I think engineering over time will evolve to. Be comfortable with that and have fluency in it and know how to guide new tech and agents and new capabilities to make sure that we feel really good about what the output is.”

“Engineering used to be, maybe not majority, but a large percentage, 40, 50, 60% writing code. You know, it's not now, especially if you talk to anybody at these labs, they're spending most of their time planning and reviewing code.”

“If the job like in the past was writing, now it's editing and shifting from being a writer to an editor is a very I think for some people they're thriving in it and some people are really shocked by it.”

“It used to be writing code. Now it's probably reviewing code. Pretty soon it will be deciding what is worth building and kind of editing kind of what could exist to what should exist.”

“There's an amount of like novelty that is more important in design than it actually is in software engineering. Like software engineering, you almost, you must want it to over index unknown patterns, right? Whereas design, it's like, no, there's an element of …”

“And that's the shift that, you know, like we're seeing with cloud code and coworkers is Coding is no longer the bottleneck.”

“I actually still think, understand, like, it's always double clicking on that layer that you depend on. Like maybe that to me is a matter, like it's always take that time to learn about your dependencies. Cause this way, when your dependencies change, like you…”

“Many people now that I know are hiring people more in their thirties, forties, fifties, because they're used to managing teams. And I think that transfers directly over to managing agents in terms of understanding the complexity of what to set up and the QA an…”

“And number two was the primary bottleneck for the past hundred years, almost. So like the rate limiter was how quickly can you write code? That is now super cheap. So that's sort of been compressed. And so the bottleneck now is like the two other ends, which i…”

“You can only build you can only build faster cars when you build airbags, right? Or seat belts. I think there's a version of that that basically needs to happen here too, right? If we keep thinking about, you know, every single support ticket needs to be dealt…”

“In hardware, we only get to compile our code, quote unquote, like four or five times. Total. Ever.”

“If the cost of software and creating software and encoding business practices in code, and like, I just literally mean the old, like software, one point no kind of code. Then if that cost is very much going to zero, we will just have a lot more of it. And so I…”

“People are going to reallocate more resources away from things like software engineering, for example, to distribution in order to grow faster.”

“AI coding tools enable engineers to be able to reach over the line and understand code that's outside of the range of things that they would normally be able to understand, normally be able to work with in a really unparalleled way that really changes the phys…”

“Sales is like a mercenary profession. It's one of those jobs where you hire people and fire them every 90 days if they don't produce and there is no place to hide. Like if your software code didn't release on February first and slipped by a week, nobody gets f…”

“I think they're merging in a way where they're not separate, you know, fiefdoms anymore.”

“I'm very interested in biology in general, like very interested in some aspects that are hard tech because I've seen software engineering kind of becoming commoditized.”

“So rolling forward that software engineering self-improvement, I think you're going to have a system that can write complete repositories, identify bugs, refactor code, But it doesn't suddenly understand biology. Right? It's just like there's a domain gap ther…”

“So, In that domain, I think it's happening now-ish. And I think we'll see the same thing too for AI research. That's a slower outer loop because now the experiment isn't just checking some unit tests passing, but it's checking what was the scaling property? Di…”

“Most of the things that make agents write better code work for humans too.”

“It's just like you can move in much larger macro actions. It's not just like, here's a line of code, here's a new function. It's like, here's a new functionality. And delegate it to agent one. Here's a new functionality that's not going to interfere with the o…”

“If you can solve for verification, which is essentially, you know, you can solve the testing part you can actually automate all the software engineering. That was sort of our key insight that like, you know, verification is the loop, which sort of keeps agent …”

“Our key insight was that to automate all of software engineering, you will have to build a platform that replicates what best engineering team do, like code reviews, automated testing, debugging, deployment, security, hosting.”

“Citadel, that put out the fact that, like, people are talking about how software engineering is gonna be wiped out by this stuff, and meanwhile, the jobs on Indeed are going up.”

“Where there's a lot in, in the code that is more transient. You know, you might be fine to Delete that. What was the intention? What was the PRD? Like, what was the customer problem? Is actually the more durable asset.”

“Software engineering was the most scarce access asset in a company, and now it's the most plentiful, and I don't think we've ever lived in that world.”

“I don't believe the like software engineering is dead and there'll be more, no more coders. I think the way I would describe it is like the role of the software engineer will change from like write working code to like produce working code. Or like cause worki…”

“Most of the economy does not have enough engineers to then maintain all those systems, to update to all those systems, to figure out the relationship between the business problem and what the code needs to do to go and actually manage that.”

“But no matter what, there's going to be 10 to a hundred times more code. So I think you can be very long engineering right now as just a, you know, purely on the dimension of software is going to become increasingly more important. Once agents are, you know, t…”

“If the job like in the past was writing, now it's editing and shifting from being a writer to an editor is a very I think for some people, they're thriving in it, and some people are really shocked by it.”

“On engineering right now, I was happy to spend, call it a 100,000 dollars to build this feature. Now it costs 20,000 dollars. I don't want less engineers. I want 10 times as many engineers, because I've actually, the set of features I would want for 20,000 dol…”

“I think coding is going away first, or coding is being, you know, done by the AI models first, and then the broader task of software engineering will take longer, but I think that is, you know, that doing that end to end, I think that is going to happen as wel…”

“You used to have to spend like two weeks on like a library, you know, change that you wanted to make in your code base. And that's now a 10 minute activity. And, but are we spending any less time building software? No, it's because we're just now doing the thi…”

“Anthropic says no one will be doing software engineering 12 months from now.”

“Also on this front, the technical people and the non-technical people and the skills that it takes to make this stuff really work, even though it's really powerful right now are still very technical. And I think that's not going to change for many years.”

“And over the next few months, I think what we're going to see is just across the industry, it's going to become increasingly solved, you know, for every kind of code base, every tech stack that people work on.”

“And so I imagine a world, you know, a few years in the future where everyone is able to program. And what does that unlock? Anyone can just build software anytime. And I have no idea. It's just the same way that, you know, in the 1400, no one could have predic…”

“It never goes away. We will need elite engineering more than ever.”

“I self-identify as a software engineer, and even over the past four months, that job has changed dramatically. The skills that made me what I am are less valuable now than they were, you know four years ago.”

“If there was a lesson from what happened over the last year with software engineering, it's that Part of the acceleration from, ah, in software engineering came from better models, but part of it also came from the fact that you now have, ah, AI embedded into …”

“Like in coding, it's not, right? Like all the studies in, in real engineering departments is not that AI makes them 10 times better. The only people who claim that are the people selling AI products, the users of it. You know, there might be individuals claimi…”

“So the consequences of bad decisions in software engineering are an externality that doesn't accrue back to the engineers who cost it in almost all instances. So it's like a little bit like factories polluting the environment. It's just like, it doesn't cost b…”

“Most programmers in the world cannot do IOI at any decent level. But, like, we're still struggling to, like, automate most programming jobs or, like, you know, there's a lot left to do.”

“Still overseeing that AI, making most of the final decisions, but I think probably in two to three years, we're going to be at the place where AI is going to be making most of these decisions, and humans will be delegating, let's say, however, maybe decision f…”

“The actual craft of software engineering that we're doing right now I think it's literally a fact that it'll be completely different two years from now.”

“I think you actually have the same problem in programming, where I think in the short term programming is verifiable, where you can look at unit tests, but once you get into real software engineering, like the unit, there is no unit test. It's like I deployed …”

“Making someone program 20% faster doesn't make you build a product 20% faster. And so starting to think about, like, what is the broader infrastructure you need so these companies can develop software and product faster?”

“So this is how we define the next-gen developer or the Tenex developer. You're strong in fundamentals of software engineering. You can use AI across all phases of SDLC. You have very good knowledge of AI concepts and you build with good taste and business acum…”

“One of the core beliefs is that the demand for software engineering is infinite. It's completely, as price will go down, the demand will increase”

“So TESL, we believe that software in the AI world, software will move from being code-centric to being spec-centric.”

“And I think that you're gonna see instead of us, for example, refactoring a, an app to have a different UI or to evolve into its new version, we're just gonna rewrite that app from scratch.”