Gil Feig, CTO of Merge, says AI agents now code better than most human engineers, with the gap closing fast. He acknowledges occasional mistakes but argues we're at an inflection point where traditional software engineering roles may become obsolete.
How much time software engineers have?
AI is a better coder than most engineers I know. It does make some mistakes here and there. It's not perfect at everything, but at this point I've seen such an inflection point in the growth of sort of intelligence of these agents that I'm not here to say it's not going to happen anymore. So I think the answer is like the gap is closing because you won't need software engineers.
Is that your doomsday prediction for software engineers?
Yes, absolutely. Imagine you had the smartest possible person on the planet, right? And you go up to them and you say, which of my customers were upset last year? Right? The question is like, does doesn't matter how smart they are, it's also a sense of knowledge. It's also, do they have the data to go through to actually decide? With OpenClaro, the equivalent would be you go, you open your laptop, you put in your password, you go up to someone random on the street and you're like, here you go, take this and feel free to do what you want. They can always go rogue. And going rogue, when someone has unlocked access to your computer, that could mean going to a browser, going to a website that you have your password saved on, logging in. Permissions are really difficult when you sync the full dataset from a third party, you need to make sure that employee A, who just joined the company as a new grad, is not able to see the board deck from your last board meeting, right? So what we do is we rebuild the permission sync twice. So we sync all of it in one engine. We have another engine that was built by someone who did not see the original codebase and also syncs those permissions. I always think of, not to bring this up, but I always think of that ship that hit that bridge in Baltimore and how for 10 minutes you could see it was going to hit the bridge. Everyone knows like this is going to hit, but there is nothing you can do. This thing is just going, going, going.
