What you need to know in order to be a software engineer, it used to be assembly language... Over time, my buddies and I realized that our favorite bit manipulation questions were starting to bounce off candidates who had never seen a bit before. We did some soulsearching in the 2010s, and we were like, do you really need to know how to manipulate bits in a bite with XORS and stuff like that anymore? Probably not... And the sad reality is that... it's not useful in any meaningful sense anymore. Why do you think that is? Walking up the abstraction ladder. That's all...

Look at graphics today compared to 1992 when I was learning graphics in university... I had to learn how to literally do the algorithm to figure out where the next pixel goes on a line... Meanwhile, two years later, I took the same course and we were doing animation... The whole ladder just kept moving up and the jobs changed... originally they needed people that could write device drivers... and now they need people who can do game worlds and physics... Software engineering jobs have been very stable since iOS, mobile, and cloud... And it's been kind of dead since then, actually.

Level one, no AI. Level two, it's the yes or no. Can I do this thing in your IDE? Level three, you're like, yolo, just do your thing... Level four, you're starting to squeeze the code out... because you want to look at what the agent is doing and not so much at the diffs anymore... At level five, you're like, "Okay, I just want the agent and I'll look at the code in my IDE later, but I'm not coding with my IDE." At level six, you're bored because your agent's busy... And so, you fire up another agent and now you're addicted because you'll very quickly get into an equilibrium where every agent is waiting...

What is your view about the IDE? ... I think that AI will do it all for us eventually... I see us coming back into a world where it's ideides except it's all conversations and monitoring... By the end of this year, most people will be programming by talking to a face... Your AI, like the Gas Town mayor, will be a fox talking to you... And it will talk only. Yeah. I think that's the only thing that's going to work for most people.

There's a vampiric effect happening with AI where it gets you excited and you work really really hard... I find myself napping during the day, but I'm talking to friends at startups and they're finding themselves napping during the day... Their batteries are draining at a higher rate. You might only get three productive hours out of a person at max vibe coding speed, and yet they're still 100 times as productive... If the engineer goes to work and works for eight hours a day and produces 100 times as much, the company captured all of that value. And that is not a fair capture exchange.

Each and every one of us has to learn how to say no real fast and get real good at it... This is the new work life balance. It's how much of the value are you going to capture from being 100 times as productive and how much of it are you going to pass along to your employer... Everyone wants to extract, extract, extract. And so I seriously think company leaders... you're going to have to be aware of this and realize that getting your engineers onto this treadmill is pulling them into... much much more of that hard thinking.

Gas Town is an orchestrator... It's agents running agents... I discovered that there's a thing I've given it the name of, it's called a heresy, that happens in vibecoded code bases... where an idea can take root among the agents that's incorrect... it starts to spread again. It comes back, right? It's like the agents want the system to work this certain way... What you have to do is you have to actually document the heresy in the beginning of your prompting and say, "Don't do that."

The bitter lesson is don't try to be smarter than the AI. Okay, you think that you've got special knowledge... What we found was bigger is smarter always... more data... They are going to make models that are 10 times or more smarter than the ones we have today... Opus 4.5 made this officially an engineering problem. We don't need you AI researchers anymore... we have something that can take a bite-sized chunk out of a mountain... And so we can eat mountains. It's purely an engineering problem at this point. It's like fire or steam.

Innovation at large companies is now dead and we are only going to see innovation from small places... Big companies can't innovate. They're all running into this problem... they're hitting bottlenecks and these engineers are getting shut down and they're quitting. We're looking at the big dead companies. We just don't know they're dead yet... Innovation comes from random individuals... small teams of 2 to 20 people will rival their output.

Programming is going to be for everybody... My wife is going to be the top contributor to our video game... and she is not a developer. I'm serious, man. It's going to be the most amazing thing because you know how much fun we've been having all those years... now they're going to get to experience it... Humans will be a moat. Humans will want humans to curate things for them... I am an optimist through all of this... first and foremost is that it's all going to work out.