How AI is changing Software Engineering: A Conversation with Gergely Orosz, @pragmaticengineer
summary
Companies are seeing token maxing where leaderboards and minimum-spend targets (Salesforce ~$175/mo) drive people to run useless agents and auto-generate tokens; some leaderboards get pulled but behavior persists. Big firms rebuild infra — mono-repo agents, custom MCP gateways, on-call and code-review retooling — while startups trade churn for six-month advantage. Evidence is mixed: a 30-person meter study finds people feel 20% more productive but are 20% less productive on measured tasks.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00What is token maxing?
- 5:27Is AI-driven productivity worth the hype?
- 12:42How the role of the software engineer is changing
- 14:45Are engineers now engineering managers for AI?
- 17:31Large tech infrastructure and internal AI tooling
- 20:41Why companies like Shopify invest heavily in AI churn
- 22:56Growing The Pragmatic Engineer and finding product-market fit
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