I wrote this eleven years ago. Replace computers with AI agents and it becomes a story about today. The essence has not changed.
May 2014 — "A developer should be someone who delegates their work to computers. If you look through history, leaders who knew how to manage their subordinates rose to the top. In the world we live in now, just as capitalists generate profit by employing tens of thousands of workers, developers should develop the ability to assign their work to tens of thousands of computers and manage them in ways that connect to business.
If we define a rich person as someone who can live without having to work directly, supported by real estate, businesses, interest income, and so on, then a good developer is someone who can create circumstances in which computers do their work even when they themselves are not actively coding. So if you want to judge how good a developer is, imagine computers as employees and ask: how many employees could this developer manage, could they share a vision with them, could they handle crises at the management level? A boss who cannot trust their subordinates stays busy micromanaging all the time. In the same way, a developer who cannot delegate automatable labor to computers never gets to begin the higher-order thinking that sits above that labor. That is where the gap between a developer and a truly good developer starts to appear."
