Out Of Gas
the 10x engineer in the age of slop
Everyone is vibing the next facebook without prior experience, SaaS apocalypse, software engineering is a dead discipline now. Soon SAP share price to zero. The uprooting of an entire career path is about to happen, except , none of this is real.
Spicy autocomplete will not replace engineering. Ever. That idea comes from people who deeply misunderstand what engineering is. Possibly the same people who think 10x engineers hate meetings because talking is a waste of their precious coding time. It’s a funny tweet because it argued that good engineers are anti-social, which was widely ridiculed even back then. Its (probably intentionally for sake of the joke) misunderstanding what an engineer does. People who sit in their cave programming away never did .. enginering. That’s just coding?
Writing code was a marketable skill for a while somewhere in silicon valley i guess, because someone had to actually make all of the buttons and stuff and little scripts for the metaverse (is this why no legs?). It was actually never enough beyond a certain seniority level. To be actually good at this job, you have to understand the space in which you’re doing it, read the material, argue, weight tradeoffs, experiment, explore, make decisions, and most importantly, explain why the computer is wrong.
That funny tweet - skeet, yeet , whatever - resonated well, because its true. Senior engineers bring value to a company by explaining waht the system in front of them does. A machine has no introspection, even if AGI was real, it would still have no way of telling you why it doesnt perform. A bad developer has the same issue. They can write some code in some popular framework but have no interest in learning the underlying assumptions made by the framework, so they will never understand what to do when it eventually fails. Those are the people most in danger by the rise of agentic code. Anyone can slop a react website and it will sometimes even work. if not insert more coin, maybe you will win this time
Good engineers go beyond understanding the tools they use. They understand why the tool exists. Clicking buttons in an IDE, or throwing prompts into claude are the same thing. It’s just using a tool to get the job done. But who made that tool, how, why, what assumptions went into its creation and under which conditions does this perform better than other tools? Is this hammer possibly not good for screws? Good engineers can argue about the reason they’re creating and select the appropriate tool for the job.
You can learn context and patterns from books, from classes, and from just trying to get the damn screw in the wall with a hammer anyway. Good engineers are out there exploring the history and future of the ecosystem they commited to. You know whats hot and who is the current voice of the industry. You have a school of thought, which is immediately clear when learning about you as an individual contributor.
In this serious of blog posts i will attempt teaching some of the fundamental reasoning and philosphy behind sofrtware engineering as a discipline.
The Dunning Kruger Slot Machine
The difference between good and exceptional engineers is this bell curve meme. Accelerating further into understanding engineering patterns rather than following them, eventually leads to a moment of understanding that patterns are made up. Yeah sorry. They’re all made up. None of this matters. If you’re interviewer is asking you to implement quicksort, they’re an idiot, or they think you are an idiot, either way you will be working with idiots.
This does not come with age directly - although age seems to be a major factor, but at the top of engineering you spent zero time arguing about tools, languages, patters. They’re just all the same pattern of “computer”. A hammer will do, whatever. The bigger issue is the screw. The building plan has a solid wall, screws just don’t work. Exploring and redistributing the right context is a key part of the job. This is why thinking “10x engineers hate meetings” is so fundamentally misguided. Talking is literally the whole job. Code is cheap, context is king.
LLMs are not just incapable of thought (they generate some words that look like inner monologue), but also incapable of managing their own context. Anyone can get it to do something, but getting it to make a thing that actually works requires engineering, the discipline of structured creation. Explaining why the thing it made is wrong requires deep system understanding and curiosity.
Unfortunately LLMs are also cocaine, delivering a quick way for a the bottom 10% to emulate the output of the top 10% without doing any of the hard work of learning and then unlearning the engineering discipline. Go straight to auto accept. But output is not outcome.
The Unbundling of Discovery and Execution
Even as engineer who has achieved the phase transition into an all knowing being of all things computer, I personally feel incompetent still. And i dont mean i dont know how a rocket is made. I made a rocket, and a custom chip, and basically everything that others dream of making.
But building things without context is just a hobby. Building successful products strictly requires navigating the environment in which why they are made. If everyone knows how to make a nuclear power plant, why dont you go make one? That’s right, because there’s 3 billion things to do and you litteraly cannot built a power plant without talking to other people. The techbro idea that anyone can slop anything now is insane and wrong, and maybe also won’t actually make you rich
There are two fundamental qualities that make an engineer exceptional. That is reasoning and ownership. They have not changed with agentic coding. I’d argue quite the opposite, the bar has lifted dramatically to the point where a junior engineer may never be able to reach it. The gap in human engineering skills is widened through llms rather than closed. People who learned reasoning are now extremely outperforming people who were just looking at code through a predefined flow like an IDE.
Of course that depends on your business model. Funny enough, agencies have much less agency in why they do things, so it almost doesnt matter. The output is the outcome, and if they can 10x the output, they make 10x the money. For companies making products, the math is a bit different. 10x output can lead to 0.1 bottom line , because you spend a lot of time cleaning up the slop.