We are at the frontier of the software craft. Soon speed of thought will match it existing in a branch and seeing it - crunching existing embedded aptterns, workflows, paradigms. Huge swathes of job titles will just go. These people would sit down with a clear vision, only to spend the next few hours fighting with setup scripts, syntax errors, and broken dependencies. Your brain was moving at light speed, but your fingers could only go so fast.
That gap is finally closing. Today, being a product engineer feels less like manual labor and more like puppet master. Your customer feedback -> fix is instant and everyones happy - except those that dont adapt and get stuck in their grief cycle.
The speed of shipping has finally caught up to the speed of thought.
Beyond the syntax
We used to believe that you had to write every line of code yourself to truly understand a system. There was a sense of pride in knowing where every bit lived and how it runs. But as the tools we use have become more capable, that belief has started to fade. Many of us have stopped reading most of the code our systems produce. We watch the stream of work happen in real time, and we step in only when something looks off.
This shift works because we have moved our focus from the lines of code to the results they produce. The living blob of a system now will eventually improve instead of laboured over up front: If it works and feels right, then ship it.
If you can build a small tool, run it, and see that it works perfectly, do you really need to spend twenty minutes checking the logic? For most of what we build, the answer is no. We are learning to trust the output and focus our energy on the design and the user experience instead of the plumbing.
We have transcended text and learn to trust in the systems that spit out results.
Parallel progress
My current workflow has changed to match this speed. Instead of grinding away at one task until it is perfect, I tend to work on one project locally while spinning up several ideas at once in the background. Each idea becomes a job for an agent.
I don't wait for one thing to finish before starting the next. I might have three or four "vines" of thought growing at the same time. While I am tweaking the UI on the main project, an agent is elsewhere refactoring a data layer or building out a new CLI tool. By the time I finish my manual task, I have three ready-to-review pieces of work waiting for me. It keeps the momentum high and prevents that frustrating feeling of being stuck on a single problem.
Backlog -> Review Queue
We’ve all had those backlogs that sit and rot for months. In the past, managing a project meant staring at a long list of tickets in a tool like Linear. While those tools are still great for organization, they can sometimes feel like too much overhead when the work itself has become so fast. These days, the goal is to keep the "work in progress" moving as quickly as possible.
The biggest change is how we treat those old tickets. Gone are the days when a backlog just sits there. Now, you can take your entire backlog—even the ideas you haven't looked at in weeks—and run them all at once. As long as the ticket has a decent heading and a bit of context, you can dispatch them as jobs to background agents.
You don't even need to stay in the room. You let the agents take a crack at "one-shotting" the task or at least suggesting the best path forward. When you come back, you aren't looking at a list of things to do; you are looking at a list of pull requests to review and merge. Most of them will probably work. For the ones that don't, the agent's attempt usually gives you enough context or a "quirk" to help you reprompt and try again instantly.
Take your backlog and give the agent a go at one-shotting it all, and report how well you go
What stays human
If the machine is doing the heavy lifting, people wonder what is left for the engineer. The answer is the hard thinking. Most software is just moving data from one place to another, and the tools are great at that. But deciding how the data should be structured, and why the app needs to exist in the first place, is still a human job.
We are moving away from being people who type and toward being people who decide. Our value is no longer in our ability to remember a specific library or fix a bug in the dark. Our value is in our taste, our ability to see the big picture, and our drive to solve real problems for real people. We are finally free to build as fast as we can think.
Anti-body reaction (natural pessimism)
This is a pretty hot topic at the moment and some purists aren't happy about it.
"Oh AI slop is everywhere, so i'm guaranteed a job for life!" is massive cope. You're betting your career on the idea that AI will stay mediocre enough to constantly produce garbage needing human babysitting, let alone ignoring the compounding exponentials of self-improvement these systems have. That's not ambition; that's praying for perpetual inefficiency so you can mop up the mess. It's choosing to clean the pie crumbs off the floor instead of baking bigger pies, or better yet, building the factories that that churn out thousands of pies a day.
"I'll be the human in the loop fixing hallucinations" is like a 1910 carriage repairman bragging he'll always have work because those new automobiles break down so often.
Embrace the force multipliers as it improves and get over yourself.
Appendix
A few thinks related to this topic for further investigation:
Shipping at Inference-Speed: https://steipete.me/posts/2025/shipping-at-inference-speed
Boris Cherny on Claude Code: https://x.com/bcherny/status/2004887829252317325
Lee Robinson on Pixo: https://x.com/leerob/status/2005700621463330888