Last week I migrated my entire newsletter to Substack in one night. A custom email system I’d built by hand, gone in a few hours. And the part that still has me a little rattled: I barely touched the keyboard. Maybe 8 times total once it got going.
I ran the migration on Claude’s new Ultracode effort: extra-high reasoning combined with Workflows. It’s basically an orchestrated loop with checkpoints. You point it at the work and let it go.
And it was amazing. Like genuinely, watching-it-happen amazing.
But it was also extremely terrifying.
Because the thing I just watched get automated is, well, the bulk of my job for the last 6 years. A real chunk of what I do. Then you read the latest news coming out of Meta, real engineers, real teams, and it’s hard not to sit there and go: okay, what does this role even look like down the line? I’ll be honest with y’all, I don’t fully know. I chew on it a lot.
But here’s the part nobody tells you about running loops like this. It is NOT purely hands-off magic. The only times I had to step in the entire migration were when I screwed up the context. Either I forgot to give it something and it stopped and asked me, or I’d handed it wrong information, sometimes wrong info sitting in my own docs that I forgot to update.
For a migration like this, that was basically the whole job. Not typing. Context hygiene.
Never feed it the wrong context. Clean the docs it reads. When Boris recently talked about writing loops, I don’t think that was just hype. I think that’s genuinely where we’re heading.
But does every company get here by next quarter? No, of course not. Most are years behind, nowhere near loop engineering workflows yet. So whatever happens at the big labs like Anthropic is definitely not what happens everywhere else all at once.
But the role is certainly shifting under all of us. I felt it last week, working on my own brand, in real time.
What do you think an engineer’s job actually looks like a year from now? 🧛