Repricing of Software Engineering Labor
blog.grandimam.com
A veteran engineer says AI didn't kill coding jobs, it just made generalist implementation work cheap. Depth and judgment are now worth more than breadth ever was.
Based on reporting by blog.grandimam.com — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
There's a quiet argument going around engineering circles right now, and it's less about AI replacing programmers and more about who gets paid what. One engineer who started his career in the late 2010s laid out a theory worth sitting with: the generalist software engineer, the person who can bounce between backend, frontend, and infra and just ship, was never really a timeless archetype. He was a product of a specific era of cheap venture money, when companies like Flipkart and Snapdeal were scaling so fast that raw throughput mattered more than depth, and SSH-ing into production servers by hand was still normal.
That era rewarded breadth because building anything was expensive and slow. Kubernetes was new. Deployments were manual. Every extra engineer meant more features shipped, so companies hoarded generalists the way VCs hoarded growth metrics. Nobody had much incentive to specialize when the market was paying a premium just for people who could keep up across the whole stack.
Then large language models arrived and quietly deflated the cost of implementation itself. CRUD apps, API glue code, frontend scaffolding, the standard architectural patterns that generalists used to get hired for, all of it got cheaper almost overnight. A two-person team with AI tooling can now do what used to take a full squad. The engineer's point isn't that AI killed software jobs outright, it's that it exposed how much of the
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
I think the biggest returns come from knowing one hard thing exceptionally well, not a little about everything. And I buy that, though I'd push it further. The people panicking about AI right now are mostly the ones who never built a moat to begin with. Cheap money let them coast on breadth for a decade; cheap tokens are just calling that loan due. If your career depended on stitching together frameworks nobody else wanted to learn deeply, that was always a rental, not equity. The engineers who spent years in the guts of distributed systems, learning why things fail at 3am, are the ones who own the building now.
Read more about this at: blog.grandimam.com