> The demand for software, at least inside my 10 year horizon, is for practical purposes infinite, or software developers wouldn’t be as highly paid as they are. (...) Look at the website of your dentist, your insurance company, your kid's school. (...) Then think about all the things software hasn't touched at all, which is most things.

> If agents are going to eat the entire software development life cycle, what does that leave behind? (...) Figuring out what the customer actually wants. (...) Deciding the definition of “good”. (...) Making it delightful. (...) [Then] marketing, user acquisition, retention, branding. Who knows what agents can do with them, but I’m not considering them.

> Entry-level hiring at the big tech companies is down 65% since 2019, at early-stage startups it's down 75%, and yet engineering as a share of hiring went up, from 46% to 55%. (...) If you don’t need juniors to handle well-specified tickets any more, where do the seniors come from? We have to train them in a different kind of job.

> So if the code is free and the operations are free, what’s left? It’s sometimes called "product sense", and it’s highly valued in senior developers. (...) Software is a formalization of a human desire. (...) It’s in the head of one specific baker who's never written it down and wouldn't know how to if you asked them. Somebody has to go and get it out of her, and then turn it into something exact enough to build, and then check that what got built is actually what she meant.

> Palantir coined "forward deployed engineer" for a person who goes and sits with the customer, figures out what they actually need, and builds it. (...) Then in 2025 postings for it grew by something like eight hundred percent in nine months. (...) The code-writing is in there, but it's the smallest part, and it's the part the agent does; what the company is paying $240,000 for is the person who can walk into a car parts factory and come out with a correct definition of "good."

> Product got separated from engineering as a career. (...) My speculation is that it’s about to collapse back into one job. (...) As the cost of software creation falls to zero, the bottleneck moves to the description of the problem. (...) For the horizon I can see, the forecast is: more software, more people making it, and almost none of them typing. We are all product engineers now, whether we like it or not, and a lot of us won't.

https://seldo.com/posts/we-are-all-product-engineers-now/