The future of engineering jobs with agents

I saw this and like the perspective. Which of these do you think will be most valuable or highest demand? I think #4

As engineering, product, design, DS, etc. melt into a new kind of role, I was reflecting on what roles might look like in the future. For example, when I look at the Claude Code team I see what I think is five archetypes:

1. Prototyper: comes up with brand new ideas; churns out many ideas, most of which don't ship

2. Builder: quickly turns a prototype/idea into production-grade product/infra

3. Sweeper: cleans up the UI, simplifies the code and system, unships, optimizes performance

4. Grower: takes a product that has been built and iterates on it to improve Product-Market Fit

5. Maintainer: owns a mature system to make it secure, reliable, fast, and efficient as it scales

Many people span across 2 roles, and sometimes 3 roles. I also notice that these roles are not really tied to job function -- eg. across Anthropic, some designers match category 1, some 2, some 3; same for engineers, PM, DS.

A healthy team needs a mix of these, depending on the product:

- A product that is new and pre-PMF needs people that are strong at 1+2+3

- A product that is growing and has found PMF needs 2+3+4 and some 5

- A product that has strong PMF needs 3+4+5 and some 2

Maybe product roles of the future will look more like this, and less like the domain-specific roles of toda?

https://x.com/bcherny/status/2071379474277613732?s=46

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The future of engineering jobs with agents