Netlify CTO Dana Lawson: Writing code is no longer the job

shimman

Looking at Dana Lawson's career on linked in, it looks like they never spent time being an actual developer. Seems fitting that a completely out of touch elite in the US would make such statements.

glimshe

Being a Chief Technology Officer is no longer the job. We now need an end-to-end AI orchestrator for the corporation in the Chief Agentic Officer role. Dana Lawson is now obsolete and must be let go.

sublinear

Was it ever "the job" at a place like Netlify? Who cares?

Igrom

It was never the job as long as the profession was called "software engineer" and not "coder".

dijksterhuis

A CTO who doesn't understand what "the job" was. Classic.

kirykl

I wonder if code quality goes up if you include “as a rockstar ninja” in your prompt

lampe3

just last week we moved away from netlify to our own solution on AWS. Services like netlify who are a layer on top of AWS are no longer needed.

smrtinsert

Little late to the thought leadership circus. What's next, limp LinkedIn posts only her sycophants like?

100ms

Netlify CTO in 6-18 months: that vibe project that caused me to say writing code is no longer the job got so unmaintainable that I hired a team of 3 to take it over. They're rewriting it by hand because tokens are too expensive now. Nobody could have seen this coming

analogpixel

> a billion new applications written by 2029 So we will have a billion new hello world, stock checker, Calendar, Todo apps, and ...? Just because you have a way to write code fast, doesn't mean you are going to come up with billions of new ideas of what to do with that code, and to be mean about it, most people don't think they are creative enough to come up with ideas and are just fine watching sports all day on tv. The apple app store currently has 2,362,917 ( https://42matters.com/ios-apple-app-store-statistics-and-tre... ) apps in the app store, and a lot of those are the same thing, so 0.236% of a billion. but to be fair, with Cluade I've written at least 10 apps I use every day. If everyone in the world (8.3 billion people) would do this, then we might get close to that billion new apps.

tengbretson

I'm not even sure if I disagree with the conclusion, but I feel pretty safe disregarding the words spoken in front of a slide profoundly declaring "UX + DX = AX"

philippemnoel

Writing code was never the job. Writing code was always a means to the job. This is why people hire "software engineers", not merely "programmers".

sys_64738

Sounds like a total chump. Why do these individuals spew these utterances voluntarily? I'm guessing it is something driven from an internal company decision so this individual now has to evangelize it as gospel to the naysayers.

techblueberry

I don’t think she’s entirely wrong, but a lot of this is basically repackaged ideas of yesteryear. We’ve been trying to do the hands off autoremediated, guardrails on code quality platform for a while now. It turns out it’s really hard. A lot of the AI hyping sounds like the cloud and serverless hyping. I remember I had a VP of engineering at a company a while ago I got into a fight with about cloud. Their argument was that cloud economics were such that on-premise was dead dead. My argument was that it could still be considered an engineering question. And while im not saying on-prem is winning; It’s not a forgone conclusion as 37signals has discovered.

orev

I think a lot of developers (e.g. the HN crowd) aren’t aware that pretty much all non-IT businesses people, from receptionists to the C-suite, really do think that what IT people do is take their (business people’s) brilliant, fully formed ideas, and just convert them into “computer language” so the computer does them by magic. There’s no understanding (or desire to) that almost the whole job (of development) is trying to figure out all the assumptions, corner cases, logic conflicts, etc. that are embedded in their “requirements”. This is why IT is always seen as just an overhead cost to cut as much as possible: because you’re not perceived as actually knowing anything about the business, only as a rote translator which can be done by anyone.