59 lines
6.1 KiB
Markdown
59 lines
6.1 KiB
Markdown
# Future of Engineering Work
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#concept #ai
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## Summary
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How AI restructures engineering *labor and roles* (as opposed to the services *market*, which is [[ai-market-shift]]). From [[2026-07-06-sebastian-interview-ai-and-software-engineering]]: once "AI can write software" is settled, the whole game is *how you use it* — and that cascades into team size, tooling, the enterprise, open source, and identity.
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## Current Understanding
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**The premise:** "It's not a question *if* AI can write software anymore — it's just a question of *how* you use it." Cost of writing code trends to zero; leverage moves to direction and verification.
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**Teams collapse from ~8 to 2–3.** No more scrum master + PM + requirements engineer + big dev team — instead one coordination/ownership role plus one or two people managing coding agents, sharing responsibilities. Coordination overhead can now exceed the work: on a small 2-person project Sebastian is **faster alone** than synchronizing who-does-what. (Cross-source: "team size is no longer a signal of seriousness" — the 4-person squad at ~$7M/yr in [[2026-06-15-rodenko-selling-development-expensively]]; solo-founder Rezi at $293k/mo in [[2026-06-15-making-money-with-ai-2026]].)
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**Bring-your-own-harness vs company-managed — and the business opportunity.** [[eugene]]'s thesis: every developer should build a personal harness on top of Claude Code (his own: a Telegram-like UI, one agent per project, inter-agent messaging, per-agent memory, "done thinking" signals; tools like **Conductor** for git-worktree-per-chat). [[sebastian]]'s counter: compliance and liability make ad-hoc per-developer setups impossible at scale — "it has to be a company-managed resource." **→ open market: compliant, centrally-managed, company-standard harnesses for large regulated teams.** This is a [[niche-selection]]-shaped opportunity ("go where the indie tools can't").
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**Enterprise reality is far more locked down than the indie world:** managed VMs, no personal laptops, zero self-installed tools; a ~1,200-engineer Roche SAP program; banks moving from banning AI to cautious adoption "because it's just so good."
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**Two smaller theses:** open source will *grow* (near-free code is easy to give away; Eugene's cynical read: OSS is mostly marketing). Legacy/hobby niches persist (COBOL in banks — no training data; people who code for love "like an old-timer car") but not where time/quality/money matter.
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**The philosophical turn — decouple identity from profession.** As many professions collapse into "prompt the AI," people who tie identity to their job title ("I *am* a doctor") will feel worthless; the advice is to separate *who you are* from *what you do*. "Fundamentally I'm Eugene — I'm not a programmer."
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**Where the human value goes** is covered by the sibling pages: judgment ([[seniority-and-ai]]), ownership ([[product-ownership]]), and trust ([[relationships-as-moat]]).
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## Evidence
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- "It's not a question *if* AI can write software… it's just a question of *how* you use it." — [[2026-07-06-sebastian-interview-ai-and-software-engineering]]
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- Team collapse to 2–3; coordination overhead > work; faster-alone — same source
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- BYO-harness demo and Conductor; compliance counterpoint; the managed-harness market — same source
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- Enterprise lockdown; Roche ~1,200 engineers; banks ban→adopt — same source
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- OSS grows; COBOL/old-timer legacy niches — same source
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- Identity decoupling — same source
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- "Team size no longer a signal": squad model — [[2026-06-15-rodenko-selling-development-expensively]]; solo Rezi — [[2026-06-15-making-money-with-ai-2026]]
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- **Counter-evidence (adversarial):** the "coding cost → 0" premise is qualified — AI's measured effect is modest (≈14–19%), can be *negative* for experts, and team-level delivery *stability* fell with AI adoption (DORA 2024) — [[ai-productivity-evidence]] / [[2026-07-18-ai-productivity-adversarial-evidence]]
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## Related Pages
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- [[ai-market-shift]] — the market-side twin of this labor-side page
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- [[seniority-and-ai]] · [[product-ownership]] · [[relationships-as-moat]] — where human value migrates
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- [[niche-selection]] — the enterprise-harness gap is a niche opportunity
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- [[ai-productivity-evidence]] — the empirical qualifier on "coding cost → 0" and team collapse
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- [[team-growth-ceiling]] — if teams collapse to 2–3, each person's growth rate becomes a larger share of the company's ceiling
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- [[eugene]] · [[sebastian]] · [[virtido]]
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- [[overview]]
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## Contradictions / Uncertainty
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- **BYO vs managed harness** is a live disagreement between the two speakers, not a settled point; the reconciliation ("personal for individuals, managed for enterprise") is the vault's synthesis. `Status: tentative`.
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- **OSS motivation** is disputed within the source (Eugene: marketing; Sebastian: expects more).
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- Team-collapse numbers (8→2–3) and "faster alone" are one founder's experience on small projects; Sebastian is explicit he doesn't know how this plays out on ~1,200-engineer programs.
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- **The "coding cost → 0" premise is empirically qualified (2026-07-18).** [[ai-productivity-evidence]] finds AI's real effect is modest (≈14–19% average, negative for experts on familiar code), and — most relevant to *team* restructuring — DORA 2024 found AI adoption correlated with *lower delivery stability* (individual speed didn't convert to better shipping; DORA reversed the throughput half in 2025, stability persisted). This doesn't refute team collapse, but it undercuts the premise that the coding *itself* is now free and frictionless; the coordination and verification work this page centres on is exactly where the measured cost stays. Early-2025-scoped — see the source's time caveat.
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- Identity-decoupling is philosophy, not evidence — included as a recorded view, not a claim.
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## Next Questions
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- What does a compliant enterprise harness actually require (audit, secrets management, standardization) — and is anyone shipping one?
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- Does the 8→2–3 collapse hold on large programs, or only on small teams?
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- If [[eugene]] is the vault owner, is the enterprise-harness market the business this vault should be scoping?
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