Only the baker knows what the bakery needs

“Only the baker knows what the bakery needs.” 🥖

That quote from npm co-founder Laurie Voss's slides sums up what I find exciting about where software engineering is going these days!

AI writes the code. So... what's left for engineers? Voss argues that they need to understand the business well enough to make good product decisions. That means spending time with the people who will use what you build.

If you love the act of programming, being told you'll soon spend less time doing it is a weird sales pitch... But I think Voss is right about the direction. AI making code cheap to produce exposes the review bottleneck (anyone keen on reviewing those 10,000-line PRs?), which will also get automated at some point.

And automating more of the code review itself exposes the next bottleneck; bringing us closer to a job centered on deciding what to build and what good looks like.

I think that brings product and engineering much closer together. The market is already hiring for the combination: Forward Deployed Engineers, for example, are expected to understand customer workflows and build production applications.

I still think there's something beautiful about crafting software. I also like the possibility of spending more time making it delightful to use. That takes attention to the person using it; and the baker can tell us plenty that we won't learn by staring at the code!

Check out Voss's talk on Youtube (opens in a new tab).