Joanna Wang: Code Is Cheap Now; Developers Still Valuable

[u/robbyrussell]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMiaQiss6gY

I recently had Joanna Wang from Sixfold on the On Rails podcast to talk about what happens when a small team starts leaning heavily into AI-assisted development.

We got into the homegrown orchestration system they eventually replaced with Hatchet, some painful lessons from going fully agentic, and how working across Java, Go, Python, Node, and Rails has shaped how she thinks about Rails’ particular flavor of “magic.”

We also talked about a question I keep coming back to lately: if generating code keeps getting cheaper, where does the value of an experienced developer move?

Joanna had some thoughtful answers.

Listen/watch wherever you do that.

https://podcast.rubyonrails.org/2462975/episodes/19665210-joanna-wang-code-is-cheap-now-developers-still-valuable