When I try to show my non programmer friends what AI can do, I always get embarrassed by how bad Claude and Codex are at non-programming work. For something that is supposed to be world changing and something that I find unbelievably exciting as a programmer, it's just embarrassingly bad at other basic work. Then I realized it's the harness that matters more than the LLM for all practical use cases.

Most people outside of the techie bubble simply cannot understand what all the hype is about AI because to them it's just a slightly more advanced version of Google, and a weird friend to chat with in the computer. Yes, most normies use ChatGPT every day. But very few people actually get productive use out of it.

One of the reasons why I think the software engineering profession is not going anywhere is because it's going to take a lot more visionaries like Steve Jobs to completely reinvent the computing experience of AI for so many different professions. As far as I know, most professions have not had a Claude Code moment like we programmers did. And it will take engineers to build those harnesses for millions of different use cases. And that's why the engineering profession is not going anywhere. Because even though LLMs may be commoditized (they already are), harnesses cannot be.