A great read as usual, Michael and Sidwyn! I agree with the new archetypes you mentioned in the post-AI world. What I don't fully understand is that the framing makes it seem like you didn't have these skills in the pre-AI world and could just become a Staff Engineer by 10x'ing your execution output at a mid-level engineer skill/knowledge set. Was that actually the case for you, or am I misunderstanding?
Holistically, my take is that while everyone can output more code now, the baseline expectations of each level are still fundamentally the same, but we've now raised the floor at every level for how much of that you're expected to produce.
I definitely agree the skills for these new archetypes exist “pre-AI.” I was a Coding Machine using Vim at Facebook (no VS Code, no Atom, no IDE), and that personality was always orthogonal to whatever tools were popular.
My argument now is that with AI, “Coding Machine” shouldn’t really be a label anymore. Not because the underlying traits weren’t real, but because the environment stops rewarding them as a distinctive identity. It’s like being the team’s human calculator before calculators were a thing. The focus, precision, and speed are absolutely transferable strengths, but once everyone has calculators and spreadsheets, “human calculator” stops being an archetype. The traits don’t vanish; they just stop being the scarce differentiator.
A great read as usual, Michael and Sidwyn! I agree with the new archetypes you mentioned in the post-AI world. What I don't fully understand is that the framing makes it seem like you didn't have these skills in the pre-AI world and could just become a Staff Engineer by 10x'ing your execution output at a mid-level engineer skill/knowledge set. Was that actually the case for you, or am I misunderstanding?
Holistically, my take is that while everyone can output more code now, the baseline expectations of each level are still fundamentally the same, but we've now raised the floor at every level for how much of that you're expected to produce.
I definitely agree the skills for these new archetypes exist “pre-AI.” I was a Coding Machine using Vim at Facebook (no VS Code, no Atom, no IDE), and that personality was always orthogonal to whatever tools were popular.
My argument now is that with AI, “Coding Machine” shouldn’t really be a label anymore. Not because the underlying traits weren’t real, but because the environment stops rewarding them as a distinctive identity. It’s like being the team’s human calculator before calculators were a thing. The focus, precision, and speed are absolutely transferable strengths, but once everyone has calculators and spreadsheets, “human calculator” stops being an archetype. The traits don’t vanish; they just stop being the scarce differentiator.