software engineering

“If you want to write a book, the easiest way is go to a publisher and sign a contract, not because of the money. In software engineering, you're not going to get much, like, 5000 dollars or something like that. That's what I was offered initially, but it's the…”

“If there's a comment to the code, that means that comments should be deleted and you should just refactor the whole thing.”

“You apply to YC and you have 90% for yourself and 10% for the engineer, right? That's, you're basically saying they're like, oh, the engineering part of this company is only worth one-tenth of me. I'm the non-technical person. So that, that to me is a signal t…”

“I think engineering is actually like one of the highest leverage things that you could be using AI to do today. And like really unlocking like, Probably on the order of at least a 50% improvement, especially for some of the like lower hanging fruit software en…”

“The bottleneck for most products these days, it's not going to be as much on engineering, but having Good taste, good intuition about your users, and that, I mean, engineers and everyone preferably in the team should have that, like, willingness at least to wa…”

“I foresee a lot of people becoming incredibly impactful in building and shipping amazing products and building gigantic companies and in everything you could imagine. Where a single person can do the job of a hundred different people in a hundred different spe…”

“So I think what engineering kind of goes to is actually what you wanted engineers to do in the first place, which is what are the most important business problems that we do need to solve? What are the most important capabilities that we need our application o…”

“The problem with the chatbot style end of things is that lacks a lot of precision. If you want humans to have completely, you know, complete control over what the software looks like and how it works, you need to let them, you know, gesture at what they want t…”

“I think we're going to shift more and more towards this agentic workflow because, you know, that's in some ways it's kind of like that the way to really get to that, you know, 200%, 500%, a thousand percent gains that, that, that, that we'll be getting to with…”

“I think in a kind of zero sum view, you might say, well, we're gonna be 10 times faster at software engineering, and so it means that we're gonna need 10 times fewer software engineers, right? But I think in practice, what really is gonna happen is actually, w…”

“I think we're all still like 20 steps away from really the future of software engineering”

“I think just like what I was good at will no longer be useful in the future or certainly not like valuable in the future and that's okay.”

“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.”

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

“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…”

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

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

“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…”

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

“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…”

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

“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 …”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”