Product-minded software engineers are thriving. Less tedium, easier refactors, manageable scope creep.
The “hard” part of engineering has moved up to higher level challenges: evals, sandboxes, etc
Sure, automating away things that would otherwise just be basically copy/pasted anyway have always been fine, but this is a very different scale.
It is interesting how people can differ in terms of disposition though.
Edit: I didn't mean to imply that one disposition is better or worse than another objectively, but rather that I subjectively find impatient, superficial, consumption-driven people extremely dull, which I also tend to associate with people who mostly care about the result. Additionally, I believe that this focus on the production of more and faster is a non-trivial contribution to producing things that have no longevity or are otherwise enshittified. The less we're involved in the intimate details of a thing, the less we're inclined to care, and the less it's even acceptable to care about quality.
I agree that there's a decent overlap here, and that your point stands. But there's a lot of merit in getting real products out there, vibe coded or not. Market forces then dictate value.
And I have always found that a little hollow, and depressingly capitalist within tech.
In the past, I’d have to put it on the roadmap, prioritize it, debate it. It’d take 25 days instead of 25 minutes. More often than not, we would have never done the feature because it was deemed not impactful enough for all customers.
Today’s world is much more gratifying to me.
Getting to the end product so much faster with so little friction really pushes the boundaries of what you can actually build. It's exciting (Also kind of ominous for obvious reasons)
Telling the AI to go, say... sort out all the IAM stuff for some new feature you're building is actually incredible.