Software Engineers Were Modern Scribes | Daily Essay

Nine years back I quit my tech job on 3 years of savings and a software skill. I spent 8 hours a day turning product specs into working code; today an agent does that in seconds. Watch on YouTube Read the full post Brought to you by: Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities. HeadsUp: Know when your competitors move. Before your customers do. Multi: Turn any content into a YouTube video. Chapters: (00:00) An agent writes code that used to take eight hours a day (00:21) Scribes press marks into wet clay for a debt (00:43) Gutenberg's press turns out more in a day than a scribe in a year (01:19) Power moves from the copyist to the publisher (01:28) Coding agents generate entire codebases from a prompt (01:51) Three jobs remain when building gets cheap Where to find Dru: I write an essay daily. Get them free Follow me on X Watch my video essays on YouTube Follow Dru's Notes on Apple Podcasts or Spotify Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day. Click here to view the episode transcript.