The Pulse #160: Why it’s so dramatic that “writing code by hand is dead”
Also: New trend of staff+ engineers and managers using AI a lot, replacing a $120/year micro-SaaS with LLM-generated code, and more
The Pulse is a series covering events, insights, and trends within Big Tech and startups. Notice an interesting event or trend? Hit reply and share it with me.
Today, we cover:
Why the claim “writing code by hand is almost dead” feels so dramatic. It used to take years for major technological shifts in computing, like going from Assembly to high-level languages, to play out. In stark contrast, LLM tooling has gone from “meh” to “good-enough-to-write-most-code” in mere months.
New trend: staff+ engineers and VPs making heavy usage of AI tools at tech giant. Microsoft’s internal dashboard for AI usage reveals interesting details, including that senior folks who barely used to code are now the biggest users of AI agents – some of it for coding use cases, others for planning and exploring.
Replacing a $120/year micro-SaaS in 20 minutes with an LLM. I used to pay $120/year for a SaaS that hasn’t added new features in four years, and didn’t fix its broken billing system for three years. Using an LLM, I managed to rewrite all the functionality I used to pay for in 20 minutes. Is this bad news for “write once, don’t update later” SaaS?
Industry Pulse. Claude Code looks more like an IDE with its new diff view, ChatGPT to host ads while Gemini stays ad-free, how Anthropic does takehome exercises during interviews, Cloudflare acquires Astro, and more.
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