So I wonder if mathematics will go through that too? A period of chaos and doubt, but finding new and more effective ways of working.

If anything - it seems that AI is _attacking_ the things the elite have. Elite people have private tutors/expert networks, now people do too for $20/month. What if the cost of education collapses to zero? It already sort of was - I learned to program on a ~$1,000 computer while Google engineers had access to $100s of millions of hardware, and it was enough.

Also, open-weight models are powerful and relatively cheap to run. So it's not like OpenAI can just close the doors (short of extremely strict regulation which seems to be a lost cause).

It makes sense to me that someone could come in and say "hey, let me run the business + finance side of the house while you practice medicine" and at least on paper I can see a real world where that works out for everybody.

Of course, soon you end up with dentists pushing unnecessary procedures and more, so it doesn't always works out that way.

But I think it's really about finding the right abstraction. As a staff or principle engineer in the beforetimes, I also didn't understand most of the code being written by the org. I dove in where needed, but more importantly I found the right layer to understand what was going on - dependencies between teams and services, data flows and data models, etc. And where I found myself most effective was when I was shaping and understanding those effectively.

- Very strict linting, type checking, and so on.

- An opinionated flow of data and clear layers in the codebase.

- Good code review workflows with multiple AI code reviewers, along with a pretty opinionated SDLC.

- Agents that look for duplication and opportunities to simplify.

- Strong opinions about our core data model.

I really think that the companies that are struggling with slop probably struggled with slop before. It just moved slow enough that things could be fixed.

which I don't think people would find misleading. Right now it looks pretty "AI" but wouldn't be hard to find a style that works well.

They should raise their prices!

And I'm gonna be honest, I kind of want to use a few of these components for real (the ASCII art is fantastic).

I think on the frontend side we're going to see a lot more scope for teams.

On a backend infra side it seems as hard as ever. Still have to think really hard problems, think deeply about data structure and flow, and deal with second- and third-order effects. Or even harder because the models like to confidently lie.

The harder question is how we train people but that doesn't seem insurmountable either. Most of us cut our teeth as junior engineers somewhere, implementing tasks that Claude can now do without breaking a sweat but was that really the most efficient way to train and learn?

I don't think IDEs as they exist today are necessarily the right abstraction anymore anyway, to the extent they ever were. At least any more than a C++ IDE that was centered on assembly language as the main thing would be. I want data models, API contracts, and data flows. I don't know what the right answer is, but I think there's something coming.