Steve (Big Red) Bishop 👨‍💻

Bishop's Law: Work done in async requires a resync. As the work complexity increases, so does the resync complexity. Resync complexity: R = αC + β (for independent streams/parallelism) R = αC² + β (for conflicting streams/concurrency), Where C is total async work complexity, α is the scaling factor, and β is fixed overhead.

What we are losing with AI is syntax -- and good riddance. The less our brains are occupied by semicolons and braces the better. There are much more important things for us to consider and manage.

Holy shit. Anthropic engineers don't write code anymore. A new hire just leaked what's actually happening inside the company shipping harder than anyone in 2026: Nobody on his team has hand-written code in months. They run multiple agents in parallel and act like managers, not engineers. His exact words: "if you're just watching an agent code, you're already behind. that idle time should be spent spinning up another agent and directing it somewhere else." The mental model isn't "use AI to code faster." It's "you are the PM, the agents are your engineers, and your job is to keep all of them unblocked." He called it being "fully AI aligned" as a team and said it changes what's even possible to build. The productivity gap between people who think this way and people who don't is already enormous. And the proof is simple: Anthropic has shipped harder than any company in 2026. If you're still hand-writing code, you're not behind on tools. You're behind on the job itself.

After sitting in silence for a moment, I follow up with this: "How many of you would say you've had a good career in programming and are glad you chose it?" Over half the room raises their hands. So the concern isn't about what the career is. It's about what it's becoming.

The near future: AI generates code. AI tests code. AI commits code. AI pushes code. AI reviews code. AI deploys code. So, developers don’t write or read code anymore. They just do two things: 1. Tell the AI what to do. 2. Review *behavior*. Result? Human code readability won’t matter. Only AI reads it. Human code review will fade away. AI will be more effective and reliable than any human. “Code quality” is dead. Behavior is what matters.

I agree with this statement. The hard part is that AI will both create jobs and put people out of work, just like the internet and other new technologies. The people whose jobs are eliminated won't automatically get trained for whatever the new job is.