2025-11-21

Author: danielcorin

src/content/logs/2025/11/21.mdx

@@ -0,0 +1,63 @@
+---
+date: '2025-11-21T18:56:41Z'
+title: '2025-11-21'
+draft: false
+tags: []
+location: 'Brooklyn'
+---
+
+import { Tweet } from 'astro-embed';
+
+I've been thinking about how, in software engineering especially, it feels like the balance of who is the builder and who is the user is shifting.
+It used to be the case that the software engineer was clearly the builder.
+I don't find that to be the case anymore.
+
+Being the builder is fun.
+You get to try new things, experiment, and see your work come to life.
+You have a lot of control over the process of how you work.
+
+Being the user, especially of a rapidly changing product, is not always fun.
+As a user, you adopted a product initially because of its utility, but then the changes start.
+
+Pricing changes.
+Features evolve or go away.
+The builders try and increase the scope of their user base.
+
+The tools used for software engineering are changing.
+Language models are in everything, for better or worse.
+
+As software engineers, we're now experiencing what many of us have put our users through for years.
+But it's not being done by any one company, but by our industry itself to us.
+
+More than I can ever recall, organizations seem to be measuring statistics like
+
+- lines of code written
+- PRs merged
+- issues closed
+- daily active sessions on internal tools
+- (and now) inference tokens used
+
+Engineers are now the targets of the optimization loops, previously mostly reserved for the users of the products engineers built.
+
+Prodded with surveys
+
+> On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely would you be to recommend this product to a friend or colleague?
+
+Turned upside down and shaken for a bit of knowledge to feed into the tool makers' road maps.
+
+I get it.
+Language models change the game for builder software.
+
+I feel this way.
+
+The tools are useful.
+The demand for them is real.
+
+But this post from Lenny has stuck with me:
+
+<Tweet id="https://twitter.com/lennysan/status/1976430524936880574" />
+
+Frantically.
+
+Organizations are pulling out all the usual tools to try and make things happen.
+And engineers are feeling the pressure.