"This symbiotic relationship between the human worker, who has a business context, and the AI, which can work faster and even smarter but lacks the input, will define the future of white-collar work that Shumer has warned about, according to Gopal. “You have to pick and choose the context and you have to keep capturing the context, right? And I think that’s really what the shift is for the average white-collar worker is that they have to understand.”
Gopal related an anecdote from his team, expressing frustration with a mediocre software engineer now that they have AI coding tools. “We’re like, ‘Man, like, it’s just more expensive to talk to you than it is to do it myself. Like, to explain what I need built on the product takes more time than me just slamming it out of AI on the side.'” The time it takes to talk to a mediocre engineer could be spent managing an AI output instead, he added. He likened this to every employee having a personal technical co-founder by their side at all times, potentially enabling them to produce 20 times as much work."
Today's 1bln CEO isn't yesterday's 1bln CEO. But I guess that's because the fiat printer goes brrr. ~lol
This I feel is a common misunderstanding though. Because the AI won't do 20x on top of itself magically, but a new engineer could ask your well skilled LLM swarm with access to years of team best practices and move from 0.5x to add their own 20x.
That requires someone to think about how to preserve institutionalization of the entire stack. May be worth putting one of your best guys on. Not to make a handbook, but to have an automated continuous learning process and an on boarding system.
I think there's a compounding effect too with multiple people working on the same thing with AI since the AI is only as good as your prompt. Having another member of the team to use AI to review, cross-examine intent, or optimize your diff is 40x if you both 20x.
Diminishing returns though, a 3rd person in the mix probably creates more noise with a committee effect... so what used to be teams of many can pare down to teams of 2.
Something we've been trying that seems to go well is jumping on a screen share, and tag-teaming planning mode. With AI writing the doc and us both in real-time it can be comprehensive scope with great detail really fast. One then executes the build-from-doc and reviews the result, the other cross-examines. The more detailed docs may be a bigger efficiency gain than with code.
Diverse tool/model preferences catch things we might not otherwise too, up to and including re-do of anything done with free Antigravity tokens.
I've been thinking about this too. 6-8 people in a dev(ops) team, scrum-style, may make things more chaotic, though I haven't had the opportunity to validate this in the field yet. If teams get smaller, intra-team will get more hierarchical though, and the real pressure could be upward the hierarchy. I think that operationally, you'll want to catch things pre-merge now more than ever: post-merge bugfixing is expensive if only the LLM understands the code, because the fix is still only as good as the prompt.
This makes sense because you synergize the 20x that way. In my own setup this is async - I no longer chat - because it's cheaper to redo than to spend interactive time, as the latter puts a timing requirement on my brilliance. The LLM is much more consistent than I am in 2026, because it doesn't get tired.
Yes. "Everyone" has LLMs now (wishful thinking but let's assume that.) Process is much more of a differentiator now. That's why I said the other day that releasing a buggy project is inexcusable now. If I wanted something buggy, I'd throw a one-liner at claude/codex in yolo mode and cut out middleman markup. But say I need a lightning wallet, I am confident that if you can ship with attention to detail, yours will be better than mine, as long as you cover my usecase. Because your prompts will be better than mine: you have thought much more about Lightning than I.
Yes. The re-do is super important. I never used to close my own PRs on my own repos and redo from scratch. Now, I'm relentless: nope! do it again.