Dan Shipper: belief

Transcript context

…Something I'm hearing from people is that now that everyone can do everything, like engineers can design, PMs can code, marketing people can ship stuff. There's just this confusion about what the hell is my job anymore. What am I responsible for exactly? Am I supposed to be shipping stuff? Am I still a marketing person? And it's just creating a lot of confusion and certainty in the world, just a comment. I mean, it's for real. And one of the things that I think is special about every is... Everyone is sort of a generalist and really loves having their fingers in a lot of different pots or whatever the metaphor is. I think that'll probably settle down at some point and it'll feel more normal. Marketing people are still going to do marketing even if they're touching the website. That's just part of marketing now. But I also think that you can get a lot further being a generalist now and that's like really cool, especially for smaller companies. The other thing that I think is interesting is there are definitely some new job roles that are a thing. And the thing that is becoming really clear is the whole Ford deployed engineer concept I think is for real and it comes out of every agent needs a human. You go to the big model companies, they have these agents that run internally, they have like teams of people that run these agents and I don't think those teams are going away. The models are going to get more powerful, the agents are going to get more powerful and the number of agents is going to grow, but people are still going to manage them. And so that looks like a very specific kind of person. And we have a couple of those people internally here and it's like the people who are in charge of making sure your agents are working and doing the right thing. We also do consulting. So we lend that out to people and I think that's a big thing that people want. And it's another one of those places where you're like, hmm, automation was supposed to take away jobs, but it looks like it just created one or many. And there's a specific type of engineer that really loves... Nitesh, who fits this, he's an AI engineer and he fits this sort of forward deployed category and he's on our team. He spends most of his time actually talking to one of our agents in Slack. We have an agent internally called Claudy, which runs our whole consulting practice and he spends a lot of time in Slack. There is code and he is using Claude Code and other things like that, but a lot of it is just talking to it and being like, "Why did you do this dumb thing? Let's fix that." And so there's certain kinds of engineers that I think love that and love having their hands on the latest thing and also love making this being that's in a workspace and it looks a bit different than more traditional, building more traditional software. And your sense there is we're not near a place where these agents don't need a human. You've said that so many times now that agents need a human and there's kind of like the setup part and then there's the maintaining it forever part and feels like both are important. Is what I'm hearing like this is going to be a job for a long time. AI is not going to get smart enough to just be fully automated for a while.…

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