Netlify CTO Dana Lawson: Writing code is no longer the job | Hacker News Reader

Netlify CTO Dana Lawson: Writing code is no longer the job

thenewstack.io

43 pointsBrajeshwar56 comments

Netlify CTO in 6-18 months: that vibe project that caused me to say writing code is no longer the job got so unmaintainable that I hired a team of 3 to take it over. They're rewriting it by hand because tokens are too expensive now. Nobody could have seen this coming

> I hired a team of 3 to take it over

There are large areas of software where the quality of code is measured by the mental model of its human maintainers. For these areas, LLMs are a net negative because their use degrades the mental model of the human maintainers.

Personally I really think LLMs help radically decrease the bus factor, by making it vastly easier to understand code and systems.

Even just reading the code, their ability to ingest colossal amounts & answer questions in incredibly useful. Once you hook them up to observability, DAP (debug anything protocol), a repl, devtools... their ability to augment and accelerate practitioners is amazing.

There can be a lot of oral history that is lost, for sure, that helps illuminate why things are built the way they are, what the intent was. I've always favored a written culture, that has artifacts that help explain the past. Engineers move projects, move companies: trusting the mental model to live in people's heads has a lot of risk and downsides to it.

Dana should’ve repeated the lie before companies started blowing past their annual AI budget and began to panic.

Still, she gets her bonus for reducing the headcount

I think a lot of developers (e.g. the HN crowd) aren’t aware that pretty much all non-IT businesses people, from receptionists to the C-suite, really do think that what IT people do is take their (business people’s) brilliant, fully formed ideas, and just convert them into “computer language” so the computer does them by magic. There’s no understanding (or desire to) that almost the whole job (of development) is trying to figure out all the assumptions, corner cases, logic conflicts, etc. that are embedded in their “requirements”. This is why IT is always seen as just an overhead cost to cut as much as possible: because you’re not perceived as actually knowing anything about the business, only as a rote translator which can be done by anyone.

It was never the job as long as the profession was called "software engineer" and not "coder".

Weirdly I find myself writing more code lately, not less. A lot of it is AI assisted but a lot of it also isn't. I find that where previously the management chain wanted things meticulously planned out, and we had to have 17 meetings with different stakeholders and principal engineers to approve the system design.

> a billion new applications written by 2029

So we will have a billion new hello world, stock checker, Calendar, Todo apps, and ...? Just because you have a way to write code fast, doesn't mean you are going to come up with billions of new ideas of what to do with that code, and to be mean about it, most people don't think they are creative enough to come up with ideas and are just fine watching sports all day on tv.

The apple app store currently has 2,362,917 (https://42matters.com/ios-apple-app-store-statistics-and-tre...) apps in the app store, and a lot of those are the same thing, so 0.236% of a billion.

but to be fair, with Cluade I've written at least 10 apps I use every day. If everyone in the world (8.3 billion people) would do this, then we might get close to that billion new apps.

A billion applications by 2029 sounds great to me. I consider MySpace to be part of the peak Web 1.0. MIDI sounds and pot leafs floating on the page. It really whipped the llamas ass. Let’s do that again.

A CTO who doesn't understand what "the job" was. Classic.

Writing code was never the job. Writing code was always a means to the job. This is why people hire "software engineers", not merely "programmers".

Looking at Dana Lawson's career on linked in, it looks like they never spent time being an actual developer. Seems fitting that a completely out of touch elite in the US would make such statements.

When I was younger I used to assume that CTO was like the ultimate experienced engineer, and most every CTO I've dealt with in 25 years has been a needle scratch for that assumption.

There are competent CTOs who are not above getting their hands dirty, and there are career politician type CTOs who have no discernible skills beyond projecting an illusion of technical brilliance.

I've seen plenty of both, and I'm sure everything in between exists too.

> career politician type CTOs

Good description; that's been the my majority of companies unfortunately.

How about product only CTOs who quietly hate engineers because they don't know what they do, and they constantly feel threatened

I've known one semi-decent one in a circa 100 people business. Used to be the head of engineering. But he was fully transactional, sell stuff mode most of the time as CTO. CEO actually said one time that he wondered if he'd "ruined" the guy a little by making him CTO.

He tried to bail me out of some very deep trouble i got myself in. Didn't end up working out, but he was good folk for sticking his neck out for someone on the engineering team when customers were screaming at him over the phone because of my screw up.

Rest of the time, they've been a networking contact of the CEO who has "some tech stuff" on their resume. Last one screwed me over and fucked three years worth of work in one fell swoop (and he admitted he did this for his own gains over slack when challenged on one of my last days at that job). still not over that one.

A CTO once asked me: Why do we have a test and staging environment? Could we propose removing them as cost savings initiative? During a time when cost savings where the number 1 priority.

What a tiring world.

"Everybody has a test environment. Some are fortunate enough to have a separate production environment."

I wonder how many people saying similar things have the same background, but having said that she was VP of Engineering at GitHub, and VP of Engineering at Heptio.

And started their career as a sysadmin. I don't know Dana at all, but some of the best kernel and networking people I've met got their start as sysadmins.

Good thing there is nothing in their career that actually signals they were a good network engineer and not just another do-nothing corpo elitist that wants to collect their bag while fucking over society.

Their time at GitHub doesn't inspire confidence, especially when their decisions likely lead to GitHub's current problems when they have a history of hiring nonqualified people.

Dont use the word 'elite' when describing people like this, it implies they are the best at something, which in my experience has never been the case, unless you count bullshitting and gaslighting.

No, elite refers to a class of people in the United States. Go study some labor history rather than going all orwell on words you disagree with.

Petty personal attack. A technical manager who manages developers should know very well the job of their reports.

"Out of touch elite"? a MAGA-like populism view in a place where MAGA is (rightly) looked down on.

> A technical manager who manages developers

I was managed by a fair share of those that had absolutely no fucking idea of how I did my job.

It is a personal attack, that's why I made it. These people have a massive influence in society, they literally dictate the direction of technology in the country. They deserve scorn and public shaming.

Do you think the direction of technology in the US is good? Do you think technology is consolidated in the US? Do you think qualified people should be making these decisions and not vanity plate chasers?

just last week we moved away from netlify to our own solution on AWS. Services like netlify who are a layer on top of AWS are no longer needed.

I wonder if code quality goes up if you include “as a rockstar ninja” in your prompt

A little terrified to speculate what a coding agent that stuck to this persona would produce (a $550/month multi-region AWS multi-region Webpack/Mongo/React stack ... for one user)

Little late to the thought leadership circus. What's next, limp LinkedIn posts only her sycophants like?

I don’t think she’s entirely wrong, but a lot of this is basically repackaged ideas of yesteryear.

We’ve been trying to do the hands off autoremediated, guardrails on code quality platform for a while now. It turns out it’s really hard.

A lot of the AI hyping sounds like the cloud and serverless hyping. I remember I had a VP of engineering at a company a while ago I got into a fight with about cloud. Their argument was that cloud economics were such that on-premise was dead dead. My argument was that it could still be considered an engineering question. And while im not saying on-prem is winning; It’s not a forgone conclusion as 37signals has discovered.

I'm not even sure if I disagree with the conclusion, but I feel pretty safe disregarding the words spoken in front of a slide profoundly declaring "UX + DX = AX"

Was it ever "the job" at a place like Netlify? Who cares?

Sounds like a total chump. Why do these individuals spew these utterances voluntarily? I'm guessing it is something driven from an internal company decision so this individual now has to evangelize it as gospel to the naysayers.

Being a Chief Technology Officer is no longer the job. We now need an end-to-end AI orchestrator for the corporation in the Chief Agentic Officer role. Dana Lawson is now obsolete and must be let go.

It sure is convenient AI isn't capable of doing the c-suite's job

The brutal reality being its probably most capable in that domain. They'll freely admit they're not "the never the smartest guy in the room" and their decision record proves it

The higher up the ladder, the more incompetent they become IMO.

If you're in the seat, no one will force you out. They'll leave, but they can't make you leave.

Can you clarify the point you’re trying to make? C-level people are forced out all the time. Even the CEO reports to the board.

That just means the board is in the seat.

> If you're in the seat

Like if you own 51% of the company?

Human C-suites will continue to keep their jobs as long as other humans in similar positions continue to buy into their airy-fairy "strategy" stuff. ;)

The enormous question here is if AI works the way these people say then surely competing companies will emerge that are enormously smaller and more agile, thus eating their lunch completely.

The fact this doesn't appear to be happening suggests something different is in play.

Token generation speed is too slow for that to happen. One can’t easily replicate an enterprise.

Use more than one single account?

Not everything can easily be run in parallel. But I do have more than one account.

One difference is, when the business hits a tough patch, the bank starts asking questions, and whether or not the bank lets it all continue depends primarily on whether there’s a CEO/CFO who:

- Has history with the bank (trust)

- Is willing to put their neck on the line

AI in the current form has no ability to put its neck on the line.

They're only called CTO if they're from CTO region of France.

Otherwise it's just sparkling AI-Cheerleader.

If a CTO said something in the woods, and no one re-posted it, are they still a CTO or just a crazy person screaming in the woods? By amplifying his message you are justifying his job, position, and standing.

This got me thinking on a new way to improve the news: Instead of reporting on the empty words people say, only report on what they have done, example:

a) Elon Musks says SpaceX is the best thing ever worth the most money ever because he is greatest person ever.

as opposed to:

b) SpaceX, run by Elon Musk, is currently Making $X per quarter, they do this by ......

the first engineer that creates a public company all by themselves will prove / get it all

Wow, you got agitated. Writing code was never a job. Software engineering is a job where part of the responsibility is to create code. “Writing code” in itself means nothing.

But what do you think about her opinion? Is writing code still a job of developers going forward? and why?

I actually think almost everything she’s describing is basically writing code. I remember Mitchell Hashimoto wrote this blog post saying he wished people didn’t take “infrastructure as code” literally. That “infrastructure as code” really meant something more like “infrastructure as documented specification”

In the agile spirit of “working software over comprehensive documentation” I do think the future of software engineering is writing code. Speaking through code is not a philosophy that’s going away any time soon imo. If anything, code is that much more important than it was before.

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