Full-breadth Developers

A lot of developers are feeling scared and hopeless about the changes being wrought by all this. Yes, AI is being used as an excuse by executives to lay people off and pad their margins. Yes, how foundation models were trained was unethical and probably also illegal. Yes, hustle bros are running around making bullshit claims. Yes, almost every party involved has a reason to make exaggerated claims about AI. All of that can be true, and it still doesn't matter. Your job as you knew it is gone.

Get serious about learning and using these new tools. You will, like me, recoil at first. You will find, if you haven't already, that all these fancy AI tools are really bad at replacing you. That they fuck up constantly. Your new job starts by figuring out how to harness their capabilities anyway. You will gradually learn how to extract something that approximates how you would have done it yourself. Once you get over that hump, the job becomes figuring out how to scale it up. Three weeks ago I was a Cursor skeptic. Today, I'm utterly exhausted working with Claude Code, because I can't write new requirements fast enough to keep up with parallel workers across multiple worktrees.