Well said. This dream is probably for someone who have experienced the hardship, felt frustrated and gave up. Then see others who effortless did it, even felt fun for them. The manifestation of the dream feels like revenge to them.
This framing neatly explains the hubris of the influencer-wannabes on social media who have time to post endlessly about how AI is changing software dev forever while also having never shipped anything themselves.
They want to be seen as competent without the pound of flesh that mastery entails. But AI doesn’t level one’s internal playing field.
> When executives fail, unfortunately, they don't blame each other. They do postmortems, then hire consultants to layoff senior engineers.
Forced executive churn has been higher than for individual engineers at a lot of my past jobs. Especially for disciplines like marketing/advertising/sales.
Yes most c-level executives (who often have to report to a board) have tendencies to predict the future after using claude code. It didn't happen in 2025 yet they still insist. While their senior engineers are still working at the production code.
User base comes from the value you provide. Value comes from the product features. Features come from code. If code is easy, anyone with 10K bucks in their pocket can provide those features and product. The only thing missing is, is the product battle-tested? That fortunately remains out of reach for AI.
Yes with few shots. you need to provide at least 2 examples of similar instructions and their corresponding solutions. But when you have to build few shots every time you prompt it feels like you're doing the work already.
It's an outlier because unlike other service industries the software has global presence. An app written by software engineers laid-off 3 years ago will still run by itself with exceptions like servers running out of disk space.
Unlike other services industry tech workers get laid off for:
1. When the product has failed market-fit and company is not raising anymore capital.
When I think of macro economics, I always start with "We live in a society"
1. For the Brain Drain, alienation will cause discontent. Politically impossible. Mass-layofs created a weaker consumer demand. Who to create any value for?
2. Gold standard - but not from the current astronomical value of the US dollar.
I remember in history class, at this period humans are merely discovering stone tools and discovery of fire. Yet here, researchers presented evidence of tools from boat-makers and other technology where humans navigate on deep waters? this is crazy!
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