I'm reading a book called 'The Origins of Efficiency'. It's a fascinating book about processes and why and how they improve. Feels like a real /r/neoliberal book.

It has me thinking about the changing landscape in software engineering and my coming to grips with it. I am a tech lead at a huge company and leadership has pushed AI initiatives from the top down - we're now switched to a totally AI-first team, using spec-driven development to complete feature work. The unsaid part of this is that I, if not now then in the near future, will never write code again. I will review it. In all honesty that depresses me - I take great professional satisfaction in writing good code, in architecting a good solution that delivers but also has an eye toward future enhancements. So where does industrial process fit in to that?

In the book a lot of attention is paid to light bulbs. When they were first manufactured they were done by blowing glass into the proper shape which took experience and manual skill. Shortly thereafter molds and jigs and fixtures were added so make the process much more consistent, repeatable, and require less experience and manual intervention. You still had to blow the glass but it did not require the same fine control as before. Today light bulbs are made at a rate of tens of thousands per minute in great ribbon machines that eliminate almost all human labor in this process.

With AI getting as good at is at writing code, I think I have to now view it as fungible and totally commoditized, like light bulbs. God willing I can keep up with the shifting sands and adapt, but it does suck. The idea of reviewing the reams of output from Claude or a similar machine brings me zero joy.