This piece was sparked by The AI Industrial Revolution with Naval Ravikant. One line from the conversation has stuck with me: “humans are becoming verifiers.” As models take over generation, the argument goes, the old functions of engineers, lawyers, and operators “move to verifying the stack” — saying yes, this is roughly right, and I’ll stand behind it.
The claim that snaps everything into focus is small and absurd: “it allows two engineers to design an entire jet engine.” The mechanism behind it is even more provocative — “the hardware engineers can vibe code their pieces.” If that holds, then hardware engineering quietly becomes a branch of software engineering, and the headcount math that has governed aerospace for fifty years stops applying.
This piece was sparked by The AI Industrial Revolution with Naval Ravikant, where one of the builders at the table offered a deceptively simple rule: “just waste tokens, save time.” Don’t optimize the inputs or the outputs, he argued — optimize your own time and the final result, because “they’re still way cheaper than a human.”
There is a specific moment, somewhere in the last eighteen months, when the coding agent stopped doing what you told it and started telling you what it would do instead. You write a one-line prompt. Instead of immediately editing six files, it pauses, reads the codebase, and comes back with: here are three ways to do this, here’s what each one costs you later, which do you want. That pause is the whole story. It is the difference between an engineer who runs with the first interpretation of a ticket and one who has been burned enough times to ask the question behind the question.
For most of software’s history, the engineer was the part. You were measured by what came out of your hands: the pull requests, the features, the lines that shipped. That measurement is breaking. The unit of engineering value has moved up a level — from the output you produce directly to the system that produces output for you. The question is no longer “how much did you build?” but, as the framing goes, are you producing the factory that would produce multiplicative outputs?