Michael Truell: prediction

Transcript context

…This begs the question for people that are currently engineers, or thinking about becoming engineers, or designers, or product manager, what skills do you think will be more and more valuable in this world of what comes after code? I think taste will be increasingly more valuable. And I think often when people think about tastes in the realm of software, they think about visuals, or taste over smooth animations, and coloring things, UI, UX, et cetera on the visual design of things. And the visual side of things is an important part of defining a piece of software, but then, as mentioned before, I think that the other half of defining a piece of software is the logic of it, and how the thing works. And we have amazing tools for specing out the visuals of things, and then when you get into the logic of how a piece of software works, really, the best representation we have of that is code right now. You can kind of gesture at it with Figma, and you can gesture at it with writing down notes, but it's when you have an actual working prototype. And so I think that more and more, being an engineer will start to feel like being a logic designer, and really, it will be about specifying your intent for how exactly you want everything to work. It'd be more about the whats, and a little bit less about how exactly you're going to do things under the hood. I think taste will be increasingly important. I think one aspect of software engineering, and we're very far from this right now, and there are lots of funny memes going around the internet about some of the trials and tribulations people can run into if they trust AI for too many things that comes to engineering, around building apps that have glaring deficiencies, and problems, and functionality issues. But I think we will get to a place where you'll be able to be less careful as a software engineer, which, right now, is an incredibly, incredibly important skill. We'll move a little bit from carefulness, and a little bit more towards taste. This makes me think of vibe coding, is that kind of what you're describing when you talk about not having to think about the details as much, and just kind of going with the flow?…

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