Lenny Rachitsky: prediction

Transcript context

…Yeah. So just coming back to this crazy moment we are living through for engineers in particular, we've gone from, you write every line of code to now AI is writing all of your code. I don't know what job has changed more in the past couple years, like job that we didn't expect to change this much where just like the job of an engineer is so different in the entire lifespan of an engineer. In the past couple years, it's now shifted to, "I don't write any more code." How do you imagine the role of an engineer and the job of a software engineer looks in the next couple of years? Just like what is that job? Yeah, I mean, it's honestly been really cool to see. And it's part of where the excitement is because the job is likely going to change pretty significantly over the next one to two years. It kind of feels like we're still figuring things out though. And so there's this excitement, I know, especially from some of the software engineers of like, we're in this rare moment, maybe over the next 12 to 24 months where we'll kind of get to figure things out ourselves and set our standards for ourselves. In terms of where I see this moving, so I think there's the common thing that everyone's saying, which is people are generally... IC engineers are becoming tech leads. They're basically like managers now. They're managing fleets and fleets of agents. I know many of the engineers on my team basically have like 10 to 20 threads kind of being pulled on at the same time. Obviously not active running Codex jobs, but just a lot of parallel threads. They're checking in on what they're doing. They're steering the agents and Codex and giving it feedback. And so their job has kind of really changed from just writing the code itself into being almost like a manager. In terms of where I think this will go one to two years from now, so one kind of metaphor that I always come back to here is actually is from this programming textbook that I read back in college called SICP. I don't know if you've heard of it, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. So SICP. At MIT, it was really popular and it was actually used as the introductory... It was the textbook for the intro programming course for a very long time. And it kind of has this cult following. It teaches you programming, it teaches you a dialect of Lisp called Scheme. And so it introduces you to functional programs. It's like very mind-opening in that way. But the thing that was memorable for me about that book, so I kind of read it in college. The very beginning of it kind of describes programming as a discipline and draws this metaphor to basically like sorcery. It says like software engineers are like wizards and programming languages are like incantations and you're like, you're issuing these spells and these spells are kind of like going out and doing things for you. And the challenge is like, what incantation do you have to say to make the program do what you want? And this book was written in 1980, so this is a while ago. And I think that metaphor has actually kind of persisted over time. And I think it's actually playing out as we move into this new era of vibe coding or just like what software engineering will look like because programming languages were basically using incantations. They've changed over time. And the trend has been that it's been easier and easier to get the computer to do what you want via programming. And I think the current wave of AI is probably the next stage of that evolution.…

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