"Engineers are becoming sorcerers" The future of software development with OpenAI's Sherwin Wu (AI column)

Another one. show-off Lenny's Podcast, in which Lenny communicates with Sherwin Wu, who directs the engineering of the OpenAI API / Developer Platform. Sherwin describes a shift in the role of an engineer from “writing code” to “managing a fleet of AI agents” and making engineering decisions at a higher level of abstraction.

The main ideas of the conversation are such 1Codex has become a standard ~95% of OpenAI engineers use it daily; work increasingly = fleet management 10–20 parallel AI agents. By the way, I love Codex too - it's just a bombshell. I can't just talk about architecture with him. (There are few people I can talk to at work.)With him, I can still make those changes - it's just magic. 2The review is being automated OpenAI writes that Codex automatically reviews almost every PR, and it helps to burqa.70PR percentage per week. 3Process speed is more important than hand code This is a case where code review has been reduced to 10–15 before 2–3 minutes. 4The productivity gap is growing "AI power users" go ahead; the closest 12–24 Months are a rare window to pump until the role of an engineer has changed completely. 5️⃣ "Models will eat your scaffolding for breakfast" NBuild a product/architecture around temporary crutches of current models – they disappear quickly. 6For techlids/EM Less control of lines of code, more orchestration of agents + process quality + ROI measurements; separately discuss why many enterprise AI implementations now give negative ROI.

What can a team do to try a new process? Pattern: spec → agent → tests → PR → auto review → human‐approve. Strengthen the “quality contract”: tests/linters/stat analysis, small PR, checklists. Start measuring: lead time PR / review time / defects after the urj - otherwise AI will remain a "toy".

That's very much in line with this year's Anthropic report on the agency future of programming, which I'm already talking about. told. It all sounds like a quote from William Gibson.

The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed.

P.S. I always wanted to be in the part where the present is as closely intertwined with the future as possible, so this year I changed my career track a lot, but about that next time...

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