I can page you. I can’t page Claude.

I told this to a software engineer today who was worried about whether software developers will still be relevant in the future.

I told him: I’ll give you Claude, and whatever comes next. But I won’t replace you with it because for me You + Claude are 5x more productive.

As a team, we can get more done faster.

Unfortunately, demos have made it look like software development is disappearing. What’s really happening is that writing code is getting cheaper.

But production software still has to be understood, operated, debugged, and improved. And when production breaks at mid-night, we need someone who understands the system, can make the tradeoffs, and owns the outcome. That's where value is.

Yes, coding is getting cheaper, but understanding is getting more valuable. That's my take at least.