Y Combinator Partner Tom Blomfield discusses the trajectory of AI coding agents and their imminent impact on software engineering jobs.
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Tom Blomfield says today's software engineering jobs will vanish within 10 years
“But the conclusion of all of that, I think, is that software engineering jobs of today, I think, will not exist in five or 10 years.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Tom Blomfield says AI will fulfill surging global demand for software
“Like I could easily see the demand goes up 10 X or a hundred X, who knows, but I just think the AI is getting so good that you just won't have humans fulfilling that demand in anything but the most niche of niche cases.”
Opinion
Blomfield: Rebranding Twitter to X was total insanity
“I think when you get something short and catchy, and you have the verb, just like total insanity to change, especially for something as meaningless as X, right?”
Opinion
Blomfield: Embedding chatbots into software is almost always the wrong approach
“I kind of hate the kind of chatbot paradigm. Like it was the easiest It was the way to bring the most basic LLM experience to the whole world. You know, we had GPT before ChatGPT and ChatGPT brought it to the mainstream, but now every product is just embedding…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Tom Blomfield built a 35,000-line app without writing any code manually
“Yeah, 35,000 lines, and I wrote not a single one. And honestly, after about the first 5000 lines, I stopped even reading the code.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Tom Blomfield says future engineers will primarily focus on wrangling AI machines
“I think there will be demand for smart people who know how to wrangle these AI coding machines, and if we want to call those people software engineers, so be it. But I think the job is dramatically, dramatically different.”