AI
AI Doesn’t Reduce Work — It Intensifies It
- Task expansion through people taking on tasks outside their role (e.g., product managers writing code) instead of reprioritizing or hiring. Because there’s more work to review from AI and it’s coming faster, the amount of work increases.
- More multitasking by starting something with AI and getting interrupted when it’s finished or needs input from a human.
- Blurred boundaries between work and non-work because tasks have reduced friction (meaning you could fire off prompts at times you’d otherwise have natural pauses).
Developers Are Forced to Use AI
- What matters most to these companies is getting stuff pushed out. If they don’t mandate devs use AI for productivity, their competitor will. It’s quantity over quality.
- Experienced engineers should consider themselves architects instead of brick layers. Vibe coders don’t count because they’re “button pushers” who don’t grasp things deeply.
- Use AI on boilerplate and repetitive things while you work on the soul of your product.
Skills Developers NEED In 2026 (Because Vibe Coding Changes Everything)
- TL;DW — modular architecture (which Gene generalized as “software engineering”) and fast feedback loops.
- Kim: “Do we really need a full semester on data structures? Probably not, right? I think that will be handled by the LLM.” He wants one dev per repo because otherwise, “all you get are merge conflicts.” I disagree with these statements.
- Kim & Yegge’s book (Vibe Coding) was also very light on details about what fundamental skills are required for juniors or otherwise.