training your replacement

Yes:

the work is moving from writing code to specifying, verifying, and curating knowledge.

But:

the code is the better spec. Their point: code is the only artifact that’s unambiguous, executable, and – this is the big one – deterministic. A prose spec is fuzzy and an agent will interpret it a little differently every time you run it. The code runs the same way every single time. So why would you treat the precise, deterministic thing as throwaway and the fuzzy thing as sacred?

Context is that which is scarce:

The scarce thing was never code. It’s knowledge – the tacit stuff every team carries around in its head and never writes down. Why we did it this way. What we tried that didn’t work. The landmine in that module that Dave-who-left knew about and nobody else does.

Agents are starving for exactly that context, and we’ve spent decades not writing it down. In fact, the senior Engineers in the org have outsized value because they have that stuff in their heads.

Senior people have no incentive to help AI. And justly so, it will not give them more job security, nor more compensation. Building a new moat is exhausting and risky, only a few will succeed.

And, chances are good replacing the human programmers with AI won’t work well anyhow (see also). But, the conniving executive might think, at least you can hire the programmers back cheaply and reset their RSU vesting clocks.

🔗 We’ve Stopped Arguing About Whether