100% - claude fable 5's coding capabilities effectively make humans redundant as a "traditional" software eng
agents now write, check and test code. they even monitor the health of the app for maintenance.
the future sits in these "cloud factories" (mainly the harness) because humans shouldn't be coding at all, they should be orchestrating:
company-level:
> custom software costs pennies and is built in a day. what are you paying humans per hour for???
industry-level:
> if costs drop then smaller players who were priced out (e.g. dry cleaners, schools) now get custom tools for free. this moves the constraint to speed vs. build
regular-person:
> if you're a customer complaining about a problem, your issue gets fixed overnight by an agent.
also the final state of all of this is an AI DOING ALL OF THE ABOVE. why should you be the one to prompt an agent?
anthropic's been ahead of the game here with their dynamic workflow feature.
My take 24 hours after Fable 5:
Your organization will likely not scale with the exponential curve of AI.
I'l just come out to say: This should be a wakeup call for engineering teams.
Set up your cloud software factories. Now.
Models can now fix impossible bugs, UI-test the hardest flows, writing extremely good code, etc. I have't opened Datadog manually as far as I can remember.
AI should be the first-line defense for bugs and feedback. Humans should only look at PRs after an AI has already reviewed it. AI should generate screen recordings of any PR before a human eye even reaches it. The agent should just prompt itself most of the time.
Ex. (pictured) our ui feedback channel manages itself, creates tickets, assigns itself automatically
You might also be worried about cost. Anthropic, OpenAI, and other labs will likely continue to put out bigger and more expensive models. But, we will also continue to get more capable small models. Not everything will need the smartest models. It's about having the organizational harness in place to continue taking advantage of this rising tide.
Moreover, if you use Devin, we've already optimized our harness a bit, and Fable is actually only ~40% more expensive in practice (vs the 2x people assume). I'm honestly pleasantly surprised - it might be higher ROI than you think.
Anyway, if you take anything away, engineers shouldn't be manually picking up tickets, humans shouldn't be digging into logs themselves, rethink what you do with your time that shouldn't just be an AI. We need to rethink what humans spend their time going.