It might scale.

So far, Im not convinced, but lets take a look at fundmentally whats happening and why humans > agents > LLMs.

At its heart, programming is a constraint satisfaction problem.

The more constraints (requirements, syntax, standards, etc) you have, the harder it is to solve them all simultaneously.

New projects with few contributors have fewer constraints.

The process of “any change” is therefore simpler.

Now, undeniably

1) agents have improved the ability to solve constraints by iterating; eg. Generate, test, modify, etc. over raw LLm output.

2) There is an upper bound (context size, model capability) to solve simultaneous constraints.

3) Most people have a better ability to do this than agents (including claude code using opus 4.5).

So, if youre seeing good results from agents, you probably have a smaller set of constraints than other people.

Similarly, if youre getting bad results, you can probably improve them by relaxing some of the constraints (consistent ui, number of contributors, requirements, standards, security requirements, split code into well defined packages).

This will make both agents and humans more productive.

The open question is: will models continue to improve enough to approach or exceed human level ability in this?

Are humans willing to relax the constraints enough for it to be plausible?

I would say currently people clambering about the end of human developers are cluelessly deceived by the “appearance of complexity” which does not match the “reality of constraints” in larger applications.

Opus 4.5 cannot do the work of a human on code bases Ive worked on. Hell, talented humans struggle to work on some of them.

…but that doesnt mean it doesnt work.

Just that, right now, the constraint set it can solve is not large enough to be useful in those situations.

…and increasingly we see low quality software where people care only about speed of delivery; again, lowering the bar in terms of requirements.

So… you know. Watch this space. Im not counting on having a dev job in 10 years. If I do, it might be making a pile of barely working garbage.

…but I have one now, and anyone who thinks that this year people will be largely replaced by AI is probably poorly informed and has misunderstood the capabilities on these models.

Theres only so low you can go in terms of quality.