Agree. Counting tokens today is like counting lines of code submitted to prove productivity. Can be completely gamed and diminishing proof productivity (aka, having any lines of code usually shows more competence than having none, but after a certain point there is no correlation and maybe a negative correlation).
What do people think of tools like www.aiqrank.com which measure on agent orchestration use, skill use etc?
I have found good success with Claude Code/AgentOS. The real question - is Elixir the best language to develop with using AI code generators? It may be?
Thank you Simon! Too many people conflate non-engineer vibe coding with engineers using ai to make themselves much more productive. We need different terms!
Look at the AI visibility tools. They all integrate with multiple LLM models, include scheduling, management of multiple external processes, data parsing, site-scraping, graphs, as well as multiple database structures. They need retry and error logic, real-time displays and updates, and multiple flow UX's, and Stripe integration with webhooks, and subscription management.
Same thing with competitor monitoring. These tools require scraping multiple sites, checking X, Facebook, Jobs sites, Crunchbase, etc, aggregating data and displaying and making sense of changes. And the same multi-process management, queuing, and Stripe integrations.
A few years ago, these would both fit into businesses requiring many months of development to get it all running. Now we are seeing dozens of companies emerging in each of these categories each month as they take weeks to build. And if one finds a cool aha (a new integration or graph or UX flow or positioning) the others can quickly follow in a week or less of AI-agent coding.
There are dozens of other categories where this is happening too.
The hard part of figuring out the nuances of the APIs and integrations and retries and AWS integrations and Rabbit MQ configurations and corner cases can all be done by AI with the right context.
If the software is doing complicated integrations, that may be a barrier as said in the article.
And to be clear, this is people using teams of Claude Code agents (either Sonnet 4.5 or Sonnet 5 and 5.5 in the future). Reliability/scale can be mitigated with a combination of a senior engineer or two, AI Coding tools like the latest Claude Code and the right language and frameworks. (Depending on the scale of course) It no longer takes a team senior and mid-level engineers many months. The barriers even for that have been reduced.
Completely agree that using Lovable, Bolt, etc aren't going to compete except as part of noise, but that's not what this article is saying.
Yeah the joke is companies want to hire someone who is already an expert in that role who is curious and a fast learner, without realizing that if someone is already an expert who is curious and a fast learner, they probably want a different role to grow into.
LOL. AI is currently like a mid-level average to good engr who can write good code but ocassionally goes off the rails. Any engr on a team with those characteristics would be heavily vetted in reviews. Almost like a smart CS intern.
If AI was amazing senior level engr, it would be a different story.
But my belief is those companies will soon realize that some of the people who they thought were junior are pretty adept at AI management - more adept than the senior people. And that skill will suddenly be more in demand than how well you can code an optimized sorting algorithm.
Some will get there faster than others of course. But AI is changing things so quickly that it may happen faster than we think, given the state right now.
I agree that AI does not replace the best people in those roles. It can do an average to good job. Maybe it can reach top 40% of the industry? If you need the best UI or best marketing, humans are still netter. Those top human jobs won't go away for a while.
With that in mind, if you just need average to good, AI can do a good job at a tiny fraction of the cost. So the average to good roles will start getting replaced.
As examples, the sites tellmel.ai, and rivalsee.com for example were created without needing a UI or frontend designer. In the past I would have needed to hire a UI employee or consultant to do either of those at a very large expense (especially for the really good ones).
Hitting the vibe ceiling is real. I know a bunch of non-devs who come to me asking for help after vibe coding and hitting the ceiling. Usually the best thing to do is to just re-start.
(Also hitting the vibe ceiling happens with developers too- best way to get around it is to revert all changes and start the feature over).