Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…It never goes away. We will need elite engineering more than ever. Because let me tell you this. In a world where everybody builds and everybody's building everything, who's doing the maintenance, right? Obtaining code bases, scaling code bases, maintaining projects, they're still going to be a thing definitely. And obviously, AI is going to be good at this, but again, that requires a different level of skills. Right? It's one skill to build something, it's a completely different set of skills to expand it, extend it and maintain it. And not to mention that in a world where everybody's building, infrastructure suffers. Right? Like, we all know and experienced Cloudflare went down two or three times in the last two or three months, the whole internet goes down. Elite engineers are the ones fixing this. Lovable experiences massive amounts of influx of new users. Infrastructure there suffers. Elite engineers are the ones building the infrastructure to hold the fort. Right? So I think we're going to need a lot of people with really good skills of like, "Hey, who actually builds the world that needs to support billions of builders now?" Because everybody's going to want to learn how to build stuff. How do we teach them? How do we maintain everything that they need? The hostings, the security, the email, the connectors, the APIs, the whatnots. So I think there's going to be room for it, but I'm also on the boat of people like, if I had an 18-year-old brother and he asked me what should I do, I would tell him, "Hey, go become a plumber. Don't go and get a CS degree. Learn a good trade." Because the new generation of millionaires in the US are actually electricians and plumbers and whatnot. Right? So it's a balancing act, I'd say. I don't know. I do still think that good engineers with good sense of understanding where the future is going are always going to be needed and scarce. Such an interesting question. I think to your point, there's definitely going to be, people need to keep building the machines that power all this stuff. Will we need engineers to build actual products, the application layer? That's the question. Is everyone going to be like you? Are designers just going to be all we need? Everybody's going to become an engineer. And let's speak to that end. I feel like I'm a rapid engineer. I'll refer to myself as a rapid engineer in a year from now, because vibe coding is just coding in 12 months from now. And even today, we spoke about this before. Like, how many elite engineers are publicly admitting, they're no longer hand coding or manually coding, whatever you want to call it. AI writes all the coding. I use the analogy here of like, coding is going to be like calligraphy. You writing code is going to be the equivalent of like, you fine printing on a canvas. And people would be like, "Oh my God, you wrote that code? That's so amazing." It's going to be so rare that it's going to become an art. Right? It's going to be commoditized completely. It already is in a sense. Most elite vibe coders rely on AI. Again, it's an amplifier. Right? So I think everybody becomes an engineer in the world of the future, a designer, a PM. Everybody is a forward deployed engineer or an AI assistant engineer or an LLM engineer or a vibe coder. The term is irrelevant. We're all using LLMs for raw output based on good judgment or bad judgment.…

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