Code is a liability, not an asset
Let’s get back to first principles. As any senior engineer knows, software development is not a typing contest. It is a decision-making process. The job is less about writing code and more about figuring out what code not to write. As Honeycomb founder and CTO Charity Majors puts it, being a senior software engineer “has far more to do with your ability to understand, maintain, explain, and manage a large body of software in production over time, as well as the ability to translate business needs into technical implementation.”
Every line of code you ship is a liability. Every line must be secured, debugged, maintained, and eventually refactored. When we use AI to brute-force the “construction” phase of software, we maximize this liability. We create vast surface areas of complexity that might solve the immediate Jira ticket but mortgages the future stability of the platform.
Orosz’s point about 996 companies producing copies is telling. Innovation requires the “slack” to think without the constant interruptions of meetings. Given a quiet moment, you might realize that the feature you were about to build is actually unnecessary. If your developers are spending their days reviewing an avalanche of AI-generated pull requests, they have no slack. They are not architects; they are janitors cleaning up after a robot that never sleeps.
