With the rise of coding assistants, anyone can become a 10x engineer:

• It’s really easy to prompt a model to add code to a codebase.
• It’s really easy to add bloat to a codebase.
• It’s really easy to spaghettify a codebase

I suspect we soon will start looking for 0.1x engineers:

• It’s really hard to have reusable code blocks and patterns.
• It’s really hard to differentiate dead code from LLM slop leftovers.
• It’s really hard to group files intelligently.

We’ve celebrated 10x engineers in the past - people who could type at the speed of thought. I suspect we will soon start celebrating the 0.1x engineers; those who don’t prompt right away but carefully curate the code and set the right patterns.