When I joined Etsy the team was two years into a rewrite chasing a more elegant architecture (actually two distinct incompatible elegant architectures), and hadn’t shipped a customer facing feature in that time. I like to say (and it may even be true) that stopping and pivoting the team to standardizing on PHP was critical to unlocking everything that came later at Etsy. After all, no one ever has to argue about what elegant PHP looks like.
We’ve always had this tension. We’ve always fetishized the act of writing code, the quality of the code, the code as the primary artifact and IP. And on the other hand successful teams have always known that the value is the system, the value is human-technology hybrid that allows a product to be delivered, meet customer needs, evolve to provide more value over time, meet the spoken and unspoken needs of the problem domain, etc. This confusion in our thinking has laid at the heart of why, for example, technical hiring was such a disaster for so long. (Hiring continues to be terrible but it’s actually much better than it used to be. We now make fun of teams that ask you to reverse a linked list on a whiteboard while evaluating if they’d like to have a beer with you. That used to be the norm)
Said another way, we’ve known for a long time that code is the easy part. Has arguably always been the easy part, but certainly has been the easiest part of building software for the last several decades.
Yes: this is a genuinely new moment.
Yes: the last 3-4 months of frontier models, and Claude Code and its ilk are genuinely something new in the world.
Yes: the cost of producing code is plunging towards something near to zero faster than almost any of us can imagine, and that’s going to require a ton of change.
Yes: it’s already breaking social contracts and requiring rethinking about how teams work together. (Review is fatiguing in a way that creating is not, something else we’ve known for a while.)
Also yes: I’m feeling the dissociative awe at the temporal compression of change.
But code being the easy and cheap part is not new.
Technology changes requiring us to rethink our social contracts and how our teams work is not new.
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