We are entering an age where we have more time to think, imagine, and chase our ambitions. As Armin Ronacher wonderfully puts it, he’s freed himself of the toil of working at the level of writing the code, and has the time to pick up a book and read as Claude Code churns away at his commands.
I’ve felt a similar unburdening. Using Deep Research, I’m able to quickly explore deep ideas without having to burn a Sunday afternoon on it. I’m able to stay more engaged with my kids and job, and have more mental capacity to explore the bigger ideas.
Before, I feel like professional engineers built into their minds the idea that new projects and ambition had a cost. There’s so many memes where the engineers are sitting in a stand-up or sprint-planning meeting, trying to explain to the PM that their wild idea will take months to build. Now that we can delegate so much to machines, we’re going to have to come up with better excuses why we can’t make software that is actually any good!
Now that so much of the grunt work is potentially going to disappear, we can reconsider some things that we held dear in the past. Do we need giant libraries when we can just generate specific solutions for our problem on the fly? Do we need to use scripting languages that promote ease of use when we’re not even touching the code? Is software going to require maintenance, or will it be generated Just In Time and discarded when the task is complete? All of these and more are now needing to be considered.
Individual Contributors are probably the most excited about this because what separated a 10x developer from the rest in the past was their ability to turn their ideas into raw code quickly. Now anyone can virtually turn their ideas into code, so many more engineers can become 10x if they’re able to hone their ability to envision, describe in words, and collaborate with the AI agents they delegate their tasks to.
Now that we are becoming unburdened, we have more time to get excited about new ideas, and we can extend beyond our areas of expertise. Maybe we can actually start solving some of the worlds real problems, and stop worrying about selling mediocre B2B SaaS to each other. Maybe!
[Note: Conversations on this weeks Oxide and Friends podcast inspired some ideas here too. I’ll cite it when the episode is posted.]