AI

Published on 17 Jun 2026 by Mithun Shanbhag

Function of:

app’s criticality (x axis): business/mission critical or throwaway
your domain/tech expertise (y axis): also the degree of specificity you can dicyate
app’s urgency (how soon do you need it).

Knowledge was earned by learning. Expertise was earned by doing. Now, all of these can be easily acquired with a $20/month subscription. Commoditized.

The threat of AI has been weaponized more than AI itself. Loved this episode!

Nobody wants to admit it but “vibecoding” works until your app has actual users. Then you discover what senior engineers have been getting paid for.

As an agent author, you need to ensure that your agent is not hallucinating at 3OI. With 2OI, at least it can figure out a path forward or just give up.

Every software developer I know is burning out. Thanks to agentic AI, everyone is now trying to be (or worse, expected to be) a polyglot, full-stack, multi-disciplinary, domain expert. People are just taking on unsustainable workloads, and with unrealistic expectations. Everything starts off as “this is too much fun”. Soon the dopamine receptors are fried, and you’ve become a sleep-deprived, token-consuming junkie.

Spot on. Grappling with this abrupt function/role change is gonna be hard for many engineers. Time to unlearn some things, reskill on others.

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The era of the “specialist” is over. The barriers to learning, doing, iterating are at an all-time low.

Five years from now, roles like “Kotlin developer”, “platform engineer”, “UI designer”, “SRE”, “data analyst”, “devrel”, etc, etc, might get subsumed into a singular knowledge worker role.

Some roles will cease to exist. Some will have diminished significance.

We’ll all be polyglot, full-stack, multi-disciplinary generalists. Token-fueled gremlins.

Some variation of this reality is likely to play out.

Interesting times for sure.

What’s your take? What’s your take?

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In the age of Agentic AI, the thing I struggle with the most is having zero “emotional connect” to my vibe-coded apps. Without the labour of love, the apps are mostly soulless constructs.